SEO should be a lot more than just an acquisition channel
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Digital PR agency Search Intelligence. See their case study at the end of the newsletter.
Next week’s newsletter will recap my presentation at the Google Search event yesterday in San Francisco, but in the meantime the slides are here.
SEO for churn prevention
Too often SEO efforts are viewed very narrowly with simple goals. Even when the stated purpose of an SEO effort has a wider business impact than just “ranking” on a keyword, it still doesn’t encompass all the other ways SEO can move the needle across the entire user journey.
A little secret
From my experience meeting with executives, many CMO's aren't aware that SEO isn't just an acquisition channel. They are surprised to learn additional ways that SEO can help a company’s revenue effort. In fact, when used effectively it can function to prevent churn, promote upgrades/upsells, and even reactivate dormant users.
If all of these channels are added back into the attribution model, the LTV/CAC (lifetime value divided by the cost of acquisition) calculation can scale ROI for SEO at a rate significantly better than any other marketing channel.
When compared to paid channels, the cost of acquisition is fixed for a specific user and that user might extend past the lifetime value expectation, but that initial spend to acquire that single user will not extend to other users. SEO on the other hand, the effort expended to launch one SEO project can acquire and retain many users over a long period of time.
Netflix vs Xfinity
To illustrate this principle, look at the two experiences in the images below. Both Netflix and Xfinity have results that are number one for their respective "cancel" terms.
Netflix's result is just a help center page with instructions on how to churn. This is a classic implementation when a help center is managed by a customer support team and the content is hosted by a dedicated help center content management system.
Xfinity also gives instructions, BUT they try to encourage you NOT to churn. They give some ideas about how to save money and why it might not be a good idea to cancel services.
What gets measured gets done
In the same way that many companies have retention specialists in their call centers who are incentivized to retain callers whose stated purpose is to cancel a service, SEO should have retention pages that are measured by how many people don't cancel.
If it is too challenging to include this in the existing help page, the company should have a different page on the marketing site which targets explicitly these search terms.
The mere existence of this page would likely be indented below the help center result and thereby push all the other click arbitrage content farmers lower down on the page.
There are too many websites that target these kinds of terms for the purposes of affiliate revenue and anything a brand can do to move them away from the terms would be useful.
5 ideas to try
Instead of SEO efforts just to acquire customers, build strategies around all the ways organic search can add revenue in all parts of the user journey.
Here are 5 things to try which can help SEO to add revenue throughout the user journey or even when that user journey is about to end.
Add text into cancellation pages which redirect users who might be on the fence over to pages that might allow them to remain as customers.
Add explicit contact forms or phone numbers on pages where users might arrive after typing search queries that indicate frustration with a service. A company can brainstorm what these are or they can simply look in their Google Search Console queries to find them.
Use word clouds in customer support email exchanges to find keywords that might not have existing landing pages. These could be low hanging terms that indicate customers wanting to find out more about features, pricing and even upgrades. If a company doesn’t create content about their own products someone else might.
Create a dedicated page which tells customers how they can contact the company for support. Many companies might have a contact page, but they look at SEO as an afterthought on these pages. If these pages are optimized, there’s a better chance of a customer looking to get in touch with a company actually finding the right way to connect.
Build a page or pages which targets terms that might not be supported by the company, but still are terms that customers might search. These are words such as “deals”, “coupons”, “promotions”, “free”, “discount” and other similar words. If the company doesn’t optimize to capture these search terms, someone else will and potentially steer them to a competitor.
I have used all of these ideas in past jobs and consulting engagements and they always unlock easy revenue. If you are looking for some quick wins to add to your roadmap, these are always great candidates.
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This is how we’ve done it:
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Great insights Eli