How Chatbots Can Boost Your Site’s SEO

Guest post my Mike Khorev, SEO consultant.

The idea of using chatbots for SEO is to automate much of the human work so there’s no need for a huge staff in place handling customer interaction and queries. The right use and setup of chatbots can also improve engagement on the site and increase your website rankings. Learn more about what a good SEO strategy looks like and how chatbots can help you improve it.

Chatbots for SEO

Chatbots carry a ton of implications when it comes to easing things both for the business and the customers. Take a look at this example – Let’s say a customer needs help tracking the shipping information about the product they placed days ago. In the absence of a bot, they may have a hard time figuring out where to look for that information. 

But, a bot can redirect them to the relevant page and guide them about where to input the tracking data to fetch all the relevant information.

All in all, it creates room for a more enjoyable, engaging, and user-friendly experience. Not only does it make things easy for customers, but it also means they feel like spending more time on the page and leave satisfied.

When you think about how Google assesses a site’s relevance, it gives a ton of importance on the average time people spend on a page, the average pages they visit, and the time taken to complete the action.

Chatbots help in all of these departments. They provide customer support and elevate the user experience. One more benefit of bots is that they make non-native English speakers less hesitant while seeking help as they don’t fear a human judging them.

What Constitutes as ‘Good Website SEO’?

Google has rolled out a ton of algorithms that determine a site’s SEO relevance. Most of which is updated hundreds of times in a year. Truth be told, no one really knows how these algorithms work and exactly what the search engine looks at for distributing rankings. At best, you can make an educated guess.

But, it’s thought that Google prefers user-centric pages. Meaning, the kind of pages that offer the best possible user experience, give exactly what the users need, and motivate users to spend more time.

Over the years experts have found the following factors to be important that determine ‘good SEO Strategy’.

• Quick load time
• Font use
• Ease of usage
• Ease of finding what the user is looking for
• Quality information
• Easy navigation

Where Do Chatbots Fit Into this SEO Story?

1. Chatbots Help to Improve Dwell Time

Taking the example of tracking shipping information – in the absence of a chatbot presence, a visitor may quickly leave the page. This is not a good case in the eyes of search engines.

Google looks at it and thinks that the page is not providing the relevant information or the help that the visitor needs. Higher bounce time is a bad thing SEO-wise.

Chatbots offer help with the needed action. They, therefore, encourage a person to spend more time on the page thus increasing dwell time.

The longer a visitor remains engaged with the chatbot, the better dwell times it leads to.

2. They Help to Facilitate Better Searches

A user could be trying to look for potentially a ton of information. It could be seeking help with, as we mentioned earlier, product tracking or shipping information. Or, it could be looking for help with business hours. 

Chatbots that greet customers and proactively ask them what they are looking for help to make searches better. You can think of it as a virtual concierge who is always ready to guide you in the right direction.

3.Chatbots Help You Get Better Ratings

A customer who is quickly able to find what they were looking for instead of looking for it at 10 different locations is a satisfied customer. A satisfied customer is never afraid to sing praise. They are likely to leave stellar reviews in Google and all the other relevant channels such as social media.

Chatbots for SEO can, invariable, thus help you secure better rankings in Google. Bots are a solution-oriented tool; something which businesses are always in need of.

4. Chatbots Help to Collect Data for Better Insight and Improvement

Bots are an excellent way in which websites can collect customer data and reviews. You can get access to user contact information by designing the bots in such a way. You can even lead them to a review form at the end of every interaction.

In the form, you can ask about their pain point, how their interaction was, and if they have any suggestions to improve the business.

Based on those views and insights, you can undertake a ton of useful improvement work.

In Conclusion

Chatbots help everyone – they help your customers, they help the business website, and they help search engines also in making a more informed decision on where to place a promising page among search engine results.

They are highly solution-oriented and when deployed intelligently -they might just be the thing your business needed.

Author bio: 

Mike Khorev is a managing director of Nine Peaks Media, an SEO agency that helps SaaS, software, IT,  technology, B2B and startup companies generate more sales and grow revenue online. They offer expert advice on marketing your company the right way through performance-based SEO, inbound marketing, conversion rate optimization, search engine marketing and many other online practices.