A quick #seobit on the importance of leveraging offline data for your SEO effort

SEO Tools May Not Hold Your Answers, But People Might

When you’re working long enough in SEO, your first instinct when you’re tasked with optimizing a page or a site, might be for you to pop open your SEMrush, Ahrefs or a keyword forecasting tool and have it do all the heavy lifting.

However, you are missing a treasure trove of useful insights, quotes, comments and direction if you instead start a conversation with the following people:

  • Your customer support team
  • Your sales team or manager
  • Your customer
  • Your product manager (if you’re selling software)

Understand Painpoints & Sales Friction

You want to ask them about either the “pain point” that leads customers to get in touch, or the “friction” that stopped the person from becoming a customer without speaking to someone. Those two sets of data can help you revise, improve and update your product pages more

Example PainpointsExamples of “Friction”
I needed CRM software that could be licensed for a whole sales teamI didn’t understand your licenses
My toenails snag my socksI couldn’t find directions to your nail salon
My website isn’t ranking onlineI don’t understand how much you charge
I forgot my anniversary is tomorrowYou don’t have open hours on your site
My shoes are uncomfortableYou don’t have shoe sizing details on your product page.
Categories: SEObits

Jeremy Rivera

Jeremy Rivera started in SEO in 2007, working at Advanced Access a hosting company for Realtors. He came up from the support department, where people kept asking "How do I rank in Google" and found in the process of answering that question an entire career. He became SEO product manager of Homes.com, went "in-house" at Raven Tools in Nashville in 2013. He then worked at several agencies like Caddis, 2 The Top Design as an SEO manager and then launched a 5 year freelance SEO career. During that time he consulted for large enterprise sites like Smile Direct Club, Dr. Axe, HCA, Logan's Roadhouse and Captain D's while also helping literally hundreds of small business owners get found in search results. He has authored blog posts at Authority Labs, Raven Tools, Wix, Search Engine Land. He has been a speaker at many SEO conferences like Craft Content and been interviewed in numerous SEO focused podcasts.