You’re a search engine optimization hero. You’ve done all of the requisite work to set-up and improve the health of your site’s SEO. You’ve got the balance right, so that your site isn’t over-optimized and free from risk of being penalized by the search engines.
Things are humming. You’re ranking for your target keywords, you’ve succeeded in driving traffic to your website, visitors are converting and leads are now sitting plentiful in your CRM.
Now what? How do you take your SEO to the next level?
Have you collected enough data about your visitors and leads to gain more insight on what is actually driving revenue? Do you know how valuable each visitor is? Do you have a standardized process to measure this?
Do you have some sense of how well you are targeting your search personas? Do you know how to segment and prioritize them?
If not, it may be too late to augment the data you’ve already collected. But it isn’t too late to set the proper systems in place to fully maximize your SEO efforts.
SEO & Visitor Intelligence – More than Just Rank
Visitor intelligence allows you to proactively collect visitor information from the search data you are capturing at the time visitors come to your site. Information you can later use for analysis, segmentation, and prioritization of your visitors and leads. This includes more than the basic information you are likely to have in your core search analytics systems, such as source, campaign, and landing page traversed.
Visitor intelligence allows you to consistently determine the quality of your website’s visitors and leads. You can scan, review, and segment that traffic to give you more information about the visitors and leads you attract.
Let’s look at seven ways to use visitor intelligence in your SEO and marketing work.
1. Simplify Your Analysis
Visitor intelligence coupled with scoring allows you to better understand visitors through a clearer system of rankings that makes it easy for anyone in your organization – whether they be in sales, marketing or support – to determine the value of that visitor. Visitor intelligence can be used to score visitors and leads and assign a value to a keyword, page and link based on the quality of the visitors and leads it generates.
2. Take an In-Depth Look at Your Demand & its Drivers
Visitor intelligence takes into account more than just the fundamental aspects of a referring source and website action.
For example, an ideal intelligence system should include demographic, firmographic, behavioral and social data. This can include company size, industry type, job title, website visits, referring keywords, LinkedIn profile and so on.
A great intelligence system will also capture the visit history of each visitor and lead as well as the various visit attributions – first touch, last touch, and tipping point. This will give you an opportunity to learn more about what activities are working for each of your search personas.
3. Prioritize & Follow-up With Leads
Once you understand the current situation of the buyer and have the visitor’s “story” told through its visit history, you will be able to approach the sale in a more effective manner.
For example, using the data your system collected, you can now score visitors and leads to allow simple prioritization of your new leads. If you know that a specific referring keyword has a higher likelihood to drive sales-ready leads, you can assign a higher value to visitors coming from that keyword and instruct your sales team to immediately follow up with any lead that came to your site using that keyword.
4. Build a Good Relationship With Clients
Visitor intelligence limits the chances of overstepping boundaries with prospective buyers.
It’s easy to get carried away while trying to finalize a valuable sale, but appearing too desperate can be a turn-off or even an annoyance to some prospective buyers. By properly gauging their interests, businesses can maintain a solid relationship with clients by not coming off as pushy or annoying.
5. Organize Your Information
Before visitor intelligence and scoring, there wasn’t really a standard method of measuring the current state of a visitor and lead. Thanks to visitor intelligence and scoring systems, businesses can properly analyze a lead from numerous angles to verify with confidence what approach should be taken next.
Scoring gets sales and marketing on the same page, and offers a consistent and objective measure of what is considered to be attractive. Without these systems, decisions are usually made based on vague descriptions vs. concrete rankings.
6. Refine & Repeat Your Successful Marketing (and SEO) Activities
Visitor intelligence gives you better insight into what working in every stage of the marketing-sales funnel. With the added insight you will know what keywords are driving content leads, and what keywords are driving marketing-qualified leads. You will know what campaigns are hitting your target audience and be able to adjust or terminate the ones that don’t.
7. Take Your Keyword & SEO Analysis to the Next Level
With the abundance of data your visitor intelligence will provide you, you will now be able to analyze your SEO efforts, and specifically your keyword performance, at a level you’ve never experienced before. Visitor intelligence can take your SEO to a scientific level not possible with simple SEO software.
SEO and Visitor Intelligence – Why You Need Both
You can use this additional data that you capture to test and see if your SEO campaigns are aligning to the right types of buyers for your organization. Connect to your CRM to determine if the deals that you closed are actually “desired” or profitable deals.
Use the information in your CRM to further refine your visitor intelligence scoring criteria. Determine which keywords are driving your most profitable customers, and invest in that content.
With SEO becoming harder and more complicated to measure and predict, a more comprehensive data approach is required to give you the insight into what’s actually moving the needle for your business. Traditional SEO solutions are lacking the connection between SEO KPIs and visitor intelligence. Find a system that provides insight to both, because rank data is just not enough.
