What is a Customer Journey?
The customer journey is the mapping of a customer’s steps; this can be from their first brand awareness through to acquisition & and past into repeat transactional intent.
A customer journey is a comprehensive mapping of every interaction with your product, brand or service – creating a journey aligning to your desired outcome and ensuring consistency is kept along the way.
In SEO, the customer journey is a critical aspect – SEO shouldn’t be strategised without an understanding of the desired outcome – this requires a baseline of a customer journey to be developed. Understanding a user journey allows SEO strategies & campaigns to be more effective across the board.
Stages of a Customer Journey
Awareness stage
The first stage in a customer journey is the “awareness stage” – This involves the recoginising of a users problem or need. Often this stage will focus on content, articles & resources to educate users.
Consideration stage
Consideration is part two – This is when a customer is in a comparative mindset, comparing products, services and brands against one another – SEO content here can be tailored towards comparison charts, case studies & leveraging specific long-tail keywords that are more specific in their intent.
Decision stage
This is when a customer is ready to make a purchase. Service pages, product pages & acquisition funnels here need to be optimised for experience – aiding the customer’s journey and ensuring the action can be made. SEO keywords can be targeted around high-intent terms such as (buy now, order today, etc.) in this phase.
Post-purchase stage
Commonly an overlooked stage in a customer journey… it’s often far harder to nurture and sell to a new customer than it is to sell to a previous one. This is where the post-purchase stage comes into your customer journey. Working on post-purchase information, cross-sales & related product information to incentivise repeat customers and increase your APF (average purchase frequency).
SEO in a Customer Journey
By integrating SEO with the customer journey of a brand, you can ensure that you offer relevant information to customers when they are seeking it within each of the 4 stages listed above.
This strategy requires content creation and keyword research to align with each interaction point, ensuring content is relevant, meaningful and can be effective in the desired goal.
By completing this, you don’t just enhance your conversions but can further improve your website’s search rankings and subsequently increase further traffic and awareness across each stage of your customer journey.
