Meta description: Learn how to improve your website's SEO with CRM software and watch your business grow as your relationship with customers improves!
The only way to successfully grow a business is to attract new customers while also retaining existing ones. Search engine optimization can help with the first part by increasing your visibility and reach online. Customer relationship management is how you'll achieve the second part. But what if you could combine these two things into an even more powerful strategy? Well, here's the good news: you can improve your website's SEO with CRM software; you just need to know how.
What is CRM software, and what does it have to do with SEO?
CRM stands for customer relationship management. It's the practice of building better relationships with your customers and business partners, and CRM software is software designed to facilitate that. Typically, it helps you collect data about your customers, analyze their behavior patterns, manage your contacts with them, and more. But what does that have to do with SEO? Well, despite the apparent focus on search engines, SEO is all about the customer. And that's precisely where the overlap happens - both CRM and SEO focus on your customers and their satisfaction.
How can CRM software help you improve your website's SEO?
You don't usually find CRM software on a list of tools necessary for SEO. There's a good explanation for that: you don't need CRM software for basic optimization. But if you want to take your SEO practices to the next level, then CRM software can be of great help in several ways.
Refine your keyword research
Keywords are one of the main building blocks of SEO. Any successful SEO strategy relies on them - you're probably tracking the most important ones for your business to see if you rank for them, doing regular research into keyword trends to decide which ones to use in your content, and more. People use different tools to do this kind of keyword research. What the vast majority of those tools have in common is that they observe the use of keywords across the internet. At best, you can find information about a certain demographic such asgeneration Z or New York City residents.
This, of course, has its uses, but it also has one major flaw: it doesn't specifically tell you anything about the behavior and preferences of your users. CRM software can help you with that. Because it records your interactions with them, it can reveal what your customers are interested in, what they like, and what they don't care for. Analyzing their inquiries and overall behavior using CRM software can, therefore, help you supplement your regular keyword research with more specific, targeted information coming directly from your customer base.
Improve your content
Content is arguably the most critical aspect of SEO. It is also the only aspect of SEO that your customer will directly consume. Visitors to your website will read your blog posts, comment on them, subscribe to them. So you need to make sure that you are creating and publishing content your target demographic will enjoy. This takes your internal SEOto the next level, helping you tailor your content to the people who actually matter rather than just ensuring it complies with SEO's best practices in general. But how will you know what your users like? CRM software is once again the key: it will provide you with information about your customers, their interests, what type of content they respond to or don't, what kind of content they praise, and what variety of content they criticize. You can use that information to guide your content creation strategy.
Build a better reputation
CRM software helps you nurture your customer relationships with ease; it allows you to build rapport with your customers, maintain contact with them and inspire loyalty in them. And there is no better marketing strategy than happy customers. Happy customers talk - they recommend your business, they rate your services, they leave positive reviews online. All this helps to improve your reputation both online and offline. A positive reputation, in turn, will attract more customers. Online, this translates to more traffic to your website, which helps your SEO rankings.
But that's all pretty indirect. CRM software can also help you with harnessing a positive reputation into rankings in a more direct way. Because CRM software collects data about both potential and existing customers, it can help you follow up on leads, respond to customers with negative experiences, and encourage customers with positive experiences to share their opinions. All this can positively contribute to your online reputation.
Get people talking
Word-of-mouth has always been a good marketing strategy. This is mainly because we are naturally skeptical toward marketing: a business has something to sell, so they'll present it in the best possible light. But customers like ourselves have no reason to lie to us - they'll tell us the truth, and we can trust them. So you want to get other people talking about your business. This requires first building a brand and then creating a buzz around that brand. CRM software helps with that. It facilitates contact with your customers and leads, which you can use to encourage talk about your brand in public forums like social media. These mentions will, in turn, signal the quality and popularity of your brand to search engines which will have a positive effect on your SEO rankings.
Other ways CRM software helps to improve your website's SEO
These are just some of the most impactful ways to improve your website's SEO with CRM software. But they're far from the only ones. CRM software also helps you get in touch with one-time shoppers and previous customers, thus nurturing leads and encouraging return traffic, both of which will positively impact SEO. You can also use CRM software to streamline outgoing communication with customers, ensuring that everyone receives a consistent message about your brand. Finally, you can even use CRM software to secure guest blogging opportunities. Simply direct your efforts at other websites as if they were business partners - CRM software can help you collect, organize and track information about them and your contact with them.