Using Live Chat to Drive SEO Google Rankings

Driving traffic is a critical part of building a successful e-commerce business. While many stores drive the majority of their traffic with advertising, this can become quite expensive over time. While it's unlikely you will move away completely from paid traffic, growing your organic traffic is great because it's "free".

The challenge with organic traffic is it takes time to build up. It's also gotten a lot harder in recent years to drive organic traffic. While SEO best practices matter, the days of buying some links to drive rankings are over. Brands that do well with SEO make it much more deeply ingrained into everything they do as a brand, and Google rewards them with more organic traffic as a result.

Unique content that your market values are critical for SEO rankings, but it's difficult to create consistently over time. Coming up with ideas can be challenging, and brands that pump out the same types of articles written mainly for Google will not see much success. However, if you use your customer service and live chat conversations as a window into the minds of what your market cares about, you can have a never-ending stream of unique and compelling content that Google will value.

At HelpFlow.com, we run 24/7 live chat and customer service teams for over 100 brands. In addition to helping our clients with over 1 million customer conversations in recent years, we also help them get insights they can use to improve their business.

In this post, you'll see how we help clients create powerful SEO content using the insights from live chat conversations. Let's get into it...

Use Live Chat to Identify Q&A Content

Google is ultimately a question and answer tool. So many of the searches done on Google are either direct questions or an indirect way of asking a question. For example, people may search for which battery system is appropriate for their golf cart, or they might search for golf cart batteries. Either way, they're looking for the same thing - a battery for their golf cart.

There are plenty of keyword research tools on the market to understand what people search for on Google, but it's also well known that the vast majority of searches on Google are unique. This means they won't show up in these tools or at least will show as incredibly low volume. Google is able to determine what someone is searching for even if all of the searches are done in a pretty unique way. With that said, if the content on your website is a clear match to the unique way somebody searches, then the odds of Google showing your website is higher for a wide range of keywords.

The key thing you need to figure out about your market is how specifically people search for the products you have and the problems you solve. Leveraging live chat on your website is an incredible way to see into the mind of your customer and how they search on Google.

• You can enable customers to start live chat conversations themselves or invite them to chat based on what they're doing on your website. Either way, their initial messages will clarify what they're looking for and what their question is.
• By reviewing a large number of chats at once, you will start to see a trend in how people talk about your products and the problems they are trying to solve with your products. Sticking with the golf cart battery example above, you may realize people focus heavily on the physical size of the battery to determine if it's correct for their golf cart rather than some sort of specification that is more appropriate. Educating them is helpful, but knowing where they're starting from is critical.
• Once you know this, you can create content on your website and product pages that align with the questions they're asking.

For example, creating Q&A content on product pages that specifically list the questions people have asked on chat and provide answers can be a great resource for website visitors (and a goldmine for Google since Google wants to help visitors answer their questions).

Create Industry-Leading Buyer's Guides Based on Customer Conversations

Similar to identifying the specific questions that visitors ask on chat and turning that into Q&A content, it's also helpful to get a broader understanding of how customers think about the problem they're trying to solve and how to best educate them about your product.

• After reviewing a large number of chat conversations about specific products on your website, you will start to see a trend in the mindset of customers and how to best educate them on your products.
• Once you've identified how customers progress towards buying, you can create a buyer's guide that dives deep into the specific stages somebody goes through. Sticking with the golf cart battery example above, you could create a buyers guide that walks them through the symptoms to know that the battery is dead and no longer usable, specific parts of their golf cart to determine what type of battery they need, and of course which of your batteries to buy based on their preferences (high end vs something that will just get it done).
  

Creating a buyer's guide is simple once you know what the most important information is for the reader. When you create a buyers guide that is the best in the industry and covers this information, Google will reward you by sending you lots of website visitors that are looking for this info on Google. The key here is using live chat as a window into the minds of visitors to know what they're looking for.

What's Next?

Organic traffic is great, but the simple tactics that are used to drive Google rankings no longer work. You need to truly align with what people want to be the best resource available from Google's perspective. You can do that by leveraging what visitors tell you on chat to drive your SEO efforts.

Are you interested in driving more conversions with live chat without having to drive more traffic?

• We run 24/7 live chat and customer service teams for over 100 stores and can drive more sales with live chat (guaranteed). Book a free Strategy Call here.
• Even if we don't work together, you'll get a ton of value from the process since we've worked with so many stores.
  

Interested in learning about more ways to improve your store? Here are a few articles:

• Making Scaling Easier with a Customer Service Playbook
• 3 Advanced Chat Greetings That Drive Conversions
• 3 Ways to Provide Awesome Customer Experiences on Live Chat

Happy implementing!!!!