The road to mastering Search Engine Optimization (SEO) may feel never-ending. After all, Google’s algorithm alone has a staggering 200+ ranking factors to get to grips with. Plus, these factors vary in priority depending on what website you’re looking at.
But if you look at the latest SEO statistics, it’s clear that optimizing your site is hugely beneficial to your business, bringing in more sales, helping you reach a wider audience, and converting leads.
Thankfully, there are many methods you can use to achieve your SEO targets. Chances are you have already optimized your blogs with keywords or researched how AI SEO improves your content.
But you may not know that conversational marketing tools and chatbots are excellent tools to add to your kit. If you’re wondering what the connection between chatbots and SEO is, don’t worry; all will become clear. But first, let’s make sure we’re on the same page.
What Is A Chatbot?
A chatbot is a software app that simulates human conversation or “chat” in an online application.
Chatbots appear more frequently on websites as they have many benefits, including improving SEO.
Teams that are often on the move but still need to attend video meetings will use hosted voice solutions. Likewise, brands that want to find cost-effective ways to improve their customer experience and SEO will use chatbots.
What Is Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization means ensuring that your website is seen by as many of the right people (potential customers) as possible.
In more complex terms, it means improving the ranking of your website so that it appears higher in search engine results when keywords are searched for. This, in turn, means improving the level of organic traffic that your website receives. More organic traffic means more business for your brand.
To increase their SEO ranking, brands must employ an effective content strategy. In other words, they can leverage customer data that chatbots provide and optimize their landing pages and blog posts with relevant content that matters.
4 Ways Chatbots Can Boost Your SEO
You may be familiar with the impact chatbots have on improving customer communication and boosting sales. But they also have numerous benefits for SEO.
Let’s dive into some of the most crucial ways you can leverage chatbots to boost your SEO rankings.
1. Lower Bounce Rate
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of customers who view a single web page before clicking away without taking any action. This is obviously not good for business but also impacts your SEO ranking.
Chatbots can be a useful tool to improve your bounce rate, as they retain customers longer on the website. A well-designed chatbot can provide an immediate solution if a customer has a question or needs more information. They are then less likely to go looking for one of your competitors.
2. Collect Data
You can also use chatbots to collect data. Many chatbot platforms provide you with analytics data on your users’ interactions with your bot, which can help you improve it over time.
For example, chatbots can help track the time visitors spend on your website, user satisfaction, user journey, and more relevant information.
This will increase your site’s relevance and make it easier for search engines to find and index your content, improving search rankings.
In a nutshell, collecting data on your website will help improve your SEO strategy and hit the top search engine rankings.
3. Increase Dwell Time
Dwell time measures how long a visitor has spent on your website before going elsewhere. This is another crucial factor in your SEO ranking.
Search engine algorithms will use dwell time to determine your website’s and content’s usefulness. Longer dwell time will subsequently improve your ranking. By engaging visitors and providing a convenient service, chatbots can be of great use in increasing dwell time.
4. Enhance Customer Experience
Great customer service should be a high priority for any organization. But with the greatest will in the world, your customer service agents can’t be available 24/7.
There are a few ways around this. If there’s no one on hand to answer the phone in a contact center, one option is interactive voice response software. But when live chat isn’t available, AI chatbots are the solution.
This means improved customer service, and it impacts your SEO in a few ways:
- Improved RVR: Your Returning Visitor Rate refers to the number of people who have viewed your website more than once. Chatbots can boost your customer experience, making people more likely to visit your site repeatedly.
- Improved reviews: Think Google Reviews or TrustPilot. These are beneficial for your brand’s reputation anyway, but search engines also use them to determine your ranking. Once again, you can use chatbots to improve your customer service and ensure those reviews are complimentary.
How To Use Chatbots Effectively
Knowing how chatbots can boost your SEO ranking is one thing. But it’s essential to understand how to implement them effectively. After all, a lousy chatbot can easily have the opposite effect. So, you need to make sure the service it provides feels human and actually helps.
Here are a few suggestions for using chatbots.
Do Your Research
The first thing you need to know is what your customers need. You can do this by gathering information from your current customer interactions or doing simple keyword research.
You may already have a way of recording the purpose of each call, email, or live chat conversation. But if you don’t, set up a system to do this, as it will give you actionable insights for your chatbot implementation.
Next, get your customer service team to fill in the blanks and find out what the most common queries are. This will give you an excellent foundation for a chatbot that can provide the correct answers.
Give Your Chatbot a Goal
Consider what you want your chatbot to achieve. Does it provide information about products and services? Then you need to ensure it can relay this accurately and concisely.
Otherwise, you may want to direct people to other parts of your website. This means your chatbot will need to provide links to blogs, FAQ pages, or product pages.
You could also use a chatbot to gather information. This could be in the form of a survey or one-off questions to find out about a customer’s journey, experience, or pain points.
Keep the main purpose of your chatbot in mind as it is developed. This will help ensure it achieves its goal.
Take It Personally
A chatbot does not replace real customer service, but it should be an extension of your brand. Visitors will be aware they are talking to an automated computer system, but they should not feel like they’re chatting with a robot.
You want to personalize your chatbot to represent your brand’s image and tone of voice faithfully. Using terminology management to collate your brand’s specific terminology is a great place to start. You can use this to inform how your chatbot will communicate.
Sometimes, customers find chatbots to be impersonal. By leveraging the right artificial intelligence and natural language processing technologies, chatbots can help answer questions and help you get positive reviews and better ratings.
Ultimately, chatbots should give a user-friendly experience without compromising your business values.
Make Sure it Works
Before you release your chatbot into the wild, test its capabilities extensively. Throw everything at it to see how it responds. Use your results to improve it, then try again. Keep repeating this as long as you need to.
Bear in mind that chatbots do have limitations, so they won’t be able to answer every user’s question or solve every complaint. But you can certainly program one to deal with many queries successfully.
Give Yourself the Best Chance of SEO Success
Knowing how to make your business stand out from the competition is a complex goal, particularly in today’s digital landscape. So, you need as many tools as possible.
Chatbots are a great addition to your content marketing strategy. Use this conversational AI well, and you’ll see better rankings and a positive impact on your business.
