We often hear about the importance of personalization in digital marketing.
However, have you ever thought about its impact on your SEO strategy?
Personalized marketing increases user experiences and, therefore, influences how they engage with your website.
In this article, we discuss the benefits of personalization on SEO.
1. Driving Relevant Organic Traffic
When building a website for your startup, the first thing you will hear is that it needs a lot of traffic to succeed.
Organic traffic is an investment in the long run. It indicates the success of your overall SEO strategy. Most importantly, it is less expensive than its paid counterpart. As your startup starts gaining exposure in the organic search, you will reduce your PPC budget.
However, organic traffic takes time and a lot of strategizing. Your new website needs to compete with thousands of competitors.
That is where personalization steps in.
One such example is keyword research. Inexperienced digital marketers often get overwhelmed by a wide range of keyword research tools. They focus on the most popular and competitive phrases instead of analyzing the needs of their target market.
In the hypercompetitive digital marketing landscape, your goal is to align keyword research with the search intent. When googling something, searchers may have informational, commercial, and navigational intent. In other words, while some of them seek information, others plan to make purchases.
Therefore, the goal is to understand the search intent behind every keyword you target. For example, if someone googles “how to repair a hard drive,” they are looking for help.
So, how does this help your SEO strategy?
For instance, optimizing your website product page or homepage for this keyword does not make sense since a searcher is not ready to purchase. They would either ignore your listing in the SERPs or immediately abandon the page without engaging with the content. To Google, that is an obvious sign that your website is not relevant to searchers. Consequently, it will rank lower in the organic search.
On the other hand, by optimizing your blog article or guide for the “how to repair a hard drive” keyword, you will attract users seeking tips. That way, you will increase their engagement rate. Metrics, such as the high click-through rate or longer session duration, tell Google that your website is relevant to its visitors. Therefore, it will start ranking higher for that keyword.
2. Generating Qualified Leads
Once a visitor lands on your website, you need to engage them and turn them into a lead. That is where personalized marketing helps.
There are many ways to use personalization in lead generation, and one of them is chatbots.
The number of brands relying on AI chatbots is growing at an astonishing pace. Apart from providing real-time customer support and automating many aspects of customer service, they serve as a perfect lead generation channel.
Through natural and personalized conversations with customers, bots capture their email addresses. You can also use them to automatically promote your lead magnets, landing pages, and time-sensitive offers. Moreover, chatbots can convince a user to take the desired action, such as visiting a landing page, signing up for a newsletter list, or downloading a whitepaper.
Personalized content increases user engagement. Most importantly, it can boost brand visibility. For example, with the help of AI and VR technologies, many brands allow customers to design their own products and share them with the public, using their official hashtags. Word-of-mouth marketing increases brand visibility, user engagement, and conversions.
3. Building Relationships with Target Audiences
From the abovementioned examples, you could conclude that attracting website traffic is not enough. Google observes a wide range of user engagement metrics when ranking website pages. Therefore, once you attract the right audiences, you need to start building relationships with them.
Email marketing is one of the most effective lead nurturing channels. Most importantly, it is easy to personalize through segmentation.
For example, when a user signs up for your email list, you could ask them about their product preferences, content needs, location, etc. Based on the data you collect, segment your newsletter list into narrower groups. That way, you will deliver highly personalized content to each user.
This tactic impacts your SEO presence on multiple levels. It helps you drive relevant website traffic, boosts user engagement, maximizes conversions, and inspires repeat purchases.
4. Forming a Brand and Increasing Its Exposure
To gain a competitive advantage in the fierce digital ecosystem, you need to build a recognizable and consistent online brand.
That is where, again, personalization can help. There are many brand-building tactics to apply, and one of them is an SEO-friendly domain name.
First, your domain name is the first thing a user sees when conducting a Google search. It should grab their attention and convince them to click on your site. As such, it directly benefits your organic traffic and click-through rate.
Second, when it is authentic and memorable, your domain name sticks in customers’ minds, increases branded searches and attracts repeat visitors.
That is why it needs to be simple and easy to remember. To personalize domain names, many brands shift from.com to more attention-grabbing options. For example, startups like Remotify.me, Label.me, or Swiing.me use .me to humanize their brands and turn them into effective calls-to-action.
5. Boosting Local Presence
You do not need to be an SEO professional to apply local SEO tactics, such as targeting local keywords, claiming GMB listings, and registering on local business directories.
However, if your business caters to an international audience, you will need to focus more on personalization.
One such example is multi-language keyword research. You need to understand the search intent in each language and optimize your content for it accordingly.
Another example is the language of your content. Research says that 73% of customers purchase more from a site in their language.
However, literal translations do not engage users and maximize conversions. Consider your target audience’s culture, backgrounds, habits, problems, attitudes, customs, etc. Based on these factors, you need to localize the content to ensure it meets the needs of local audiences.
Over to You
Personalization and SEO are a match made in heaven. By personalizing user experiences, you will reduce bounce rates and maximize engagement metrics, such as session duration, time on page, the CTR, scroll depth, etc. These metrics inform Google about the relevance of your website and help it rank higher.
