Awesome products deserve an awesome introduction to the market.
A customer education program helps build momentum about your new product and gets customers excited! On a practical level, customer education helps customers learn the inside out of your product, so they can get true value from their purchase.
Creating a customer training program comes with an additional challenge compared to employee training: you’ll also need to promote it. For this reason–and even more so if you want to monetize your program–you might need to move to a course creation platform with sales and marketing features.
Is customer education worth the trouble? Definitely yes! Companies deploying customer training programs report higher product adoption, renewals, and customer satisfaction rates, among other business benefits.
To promote your program, you just need to get Google (and other search engines) to like you. This can be achieved by optimizing your content, making it easier for search engines to discover your website and appear high in the search results.
In this post, we will show you 6 actionable and effective SEO strategies that can help you befriend search engines, promote your customer training program, and improve critical SaaS KPIs.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your web pages with keywords, backlinks, and other methods so that they appear among Google results when people also search for relevant information. The higher they appear, the more likely people will click on them and visit your website.
An efficient SEO strategy will increase organic, quality traffic to your website without you paying for clicks. If you want to be displayed in the results, you can also pay for the ad placement and for every click. This is called Search Engine Marketing (SEM), but today we’re looking at SEO, which comes with a higher ROI than SEM.
6 Actionable SEO Strategies to Promote Your Customer Education Program
The 6 SEO strategies that we will explore today can be easily implemented even if you have little relevant experience.
Before we dive in, let’s explain something you need to keep in mind at all times. With Google, it’s all about user experience. Anything that can affect your ranking can be linked back to whether it enhances or compromises the user’s experience.
- Optimize With Keywords
Adding keywords to your landing pages and blog (if you have one) is at the heart of organic SEO. This is how you will attract faster and more effectively people who are looking for relevant information.
One word of advice: do not overdo it with keywords. Using too many keywords–a practice known as “keyword stuffing”–results in poor-quality and unnatural content no one wants to read.
Keyword stuffing has a devastating effect on critical metrics, like Time on Page and Bounce Rate. People abandoning your website after a few seconds rubs Google up the wrong way, and down goes your ranking.
Discovering keywords
From simple to advanced, we have a few ideas for you to discover keywords that serve your purpose:
Google (Autocomplete): You must have noticed that as soon as you start typing a query, Google automatically completes it. And it doesn’t complete it by chance: it’s always with the most popular queries.
Google Related Searches: Once you complete your search, Google will give you more keyword ideas with related searches.
Google Keyword Planner: This is a more organized approach that can give you a more accurate idea about the best keywords to use. Google Keyword Planner will generate keyword ideas based on the search term you insert (and some additional data we’ll see in a minute).
Google Trends: Google trends will tell you whether a certain keyword/search term is rising or decreasing in popularity. You can set additional filters, like a time period and region for more specific results.
Similar to the Keyword Planner, Google Trends will also give you ideas about similar terms and how they are trending. That said, a term rising in popularity does not necessarily mean it is popular, and it is best to look at the actual number of searches.
Choosing the right keywords
So, Google has given you more than a couple of ideas. But what elements should you look at to evaluate them? What should you keep into consideration?
Relevance: This is something you need to judge for yourself. Let’s say you are a company called Infinity and offer a time tracking app. How might your clients be looking to see if you offer training material? Probably with something like “infinity training for customers” or “how does infinity work.” Top time tracking software, while it is not entirely irrelevant, is not as close to the user intent.
Volume: Volume is the number of monthly searches for a keyword. But it is not a “higher the better” situation. Keywords with very high volume are usually more generic and do not attract the right people. It’s best to opt for keywords with 100-10.000 searches per month.
Keyword difficulty: If you are using an SEO tool, you will also get an estimation of the keyword’s difficulty in terms of ranking. Again, usually the more generic the term is the harder it will be to rank for. This is why it is best to use longer, more descriptive keywords, also known as long-tail keywords.
User intent: Without getting too technical about this, it is good practice to choose keywords that are relevant to why a customer might be looking you up. Are they looking for tips to manage their time better? No. Are they looking to buy time management software? No. They are probably already your customers and are looking for tips to use your product better. If this is the case with new customers especially, you should really consider getting customer onboarding software to make this stage as professional as possible.
- Optimize your Landing Pages
Your course pages should also be optimized for SEO. It sure helps a lot if your course creation platform supports SEO optimization. There are many little tweaks you can do to boost your ranking, like the following:
Add a title tag
Every landing page talking about your customer education program must have a title tag. The title tag is the title that appears on Google results. You want it to be brief, catchy, and with keywords.
A good title tag prompts the reader to click on your page, this way improving your Click-Through Rate (CTR) and signaling to Google that your page successfully answers the user’s query (at least on a first level). The more people click on your page, the higher you will appear in the results.
Use headings
Headings give you another opportunity to add keywords to your pages. Plus, your content will be organized and the pages will look better and uncluttered. For your headings, use secondary and long-tail keywords.
Write a meta description
A meta description is a short text that appears below the title tag in the Google results. It is another section to enrich with keywords and also with on-point information that will prompt the user to click on the web page. Keep your meta description brief and punchy, ideally under 156 words.
Offer true value
We have already explained that it is important to not just draw the reader in, but keep them on your page. Show people that you know what you are talking about and offer valuable information that is relevant to the user’s query, so that they keep on reading and exploring your website. Make sure your copy is well written, concise, and free of embarrassing spelling mistakes.
- Optimize Your Images
Images are an essential addition to your website. They draw attention and add color and character to a web page. Even subconsciously, images tell the customer a lot about your brand’s personality.
Optimizing the images you add to your website also plays an important role in improving your Google ranking and the user experience of a visually impaired user. Optimizing your images for SEO is super easy! Here’s what you can do:
Compress your images
Did you know that large images can increase loading times and hurt your ranking? Luckily, compressing an image is a simple process that does not compromise the quality of your images. There are many image compressors that can do the job for free. The best format to use, as suggested by Google, is WebP.
Choose a unique photo
Ideally, you want to use unique images that you have created yourself. It does not have to be something complicated – even screenshots or something you created on Canva will do! Using existing images does not hurt your SEO, but it does not boost it either.
Add alt-text
Be mindful of visually impaired readers and help Google crawl your website with alt-text. Alt-text, which is short for alternative text, is a short description of the image that includes a couple of keywords. Remember that alt-text is not visible on your website; it is read by screen readers and search engines. If you want the text to be visible on your website, you should add a caption.
Name the image
Naming the images you use is a small detail to take care of. It barely has an impact on SEO, but it is still considered good practice. Your image name should be something like female-employee-using-laptop.webp. There’s no need to use a keyword here unless it comes naturally.
- Blogging
Maintaining a blog is an excellent marketing strategy that can drive organic traffic to your website and quality leads by offering your clients, useful information and advice. You can use your blog to offer advice about your product and link to your new customer training program. Another idea will be offering them to have a look at your coaching contract template to decide if they want to use the service.
Throughout your blog, keep all SEO good practices: a moderate amount of keywords, concise language, structured text, and optimized images. A couple of more things to remember are:
- Add links either to content on your own website or to external websites of high domain authority. Links to trustworthy resources add credibility to your content.
- Lists and how-to articles are top choices for blogging. Due to their format, they are very easy to read and scan through, so they are among readers’ favorites.
- Get technical (SEO)
Technical SEO refers to website and server optimizations that help search engines crawl your website and improve your ranking. We have a few quick tips on technical SEO that you can easily put into action:
- Optimize for mobile devices. More than 50% of website traffic is generated on mobile devices. Mobile-friendliness is officially a ranking factor, with Google giving an advantage to websites that offer a seamless user experience on mobile devices.
- Speed up your website. Site speed is the time it takes a website to load after the user clicks on the link that appears in the search results (the title tag). 3 seconds is the longest 40% of users will wait for your page to load before they leave. Ensure you buy one of the best enterprise WordPress hosting and speed your site up. Cloud web hosting services can help speed up your website and grow with your business, making it less likely you’ll lose customers from sudden traffic spikes. Need we say more?
- Get an SSL certificate. An SSL certificate ensures that all data transmitted via your website is encrypted. Hosting service providers usually offer SSL certificates. Alternatively, or if you are self-hosted, you can purchase one and implement it yourself s well as SSL monitoring to ensure its validity.
- Get Social
Social media does not impact ranking directly. Still, posting useful content on social media, from videos to blog posts and infographics, improves your ranking indirectly by sending “social signals” to Google.
Being active on social media has multiple benefits and ultimately contributes to higher positions among Google results. This is how it works:
➣ The content draws attention and gets re-shared on social media
➣ More people learn about your brand
➣ You get more brand mentions and links to your website
➣ More traffic is brought to your website organically
➣ Your website’s Domain Authority increases and therefore you start ranking higher.
Ready to Power up Your Customer Education Program?
Building a customer training program is hard work, however, it is as vital as having an employee training program, and promoting it is a close second. Yet, it comes with multiple business benefits, so make sure to put customer onboarding on your to-do list if you have not done so already.
We hope you have found some handy tips in this post and that we have given you a couple of ideas that you have not thought about before. As you apply these strategies, be patient–it might take a while before Google “warms up” to you.
If you have been in the business for a while and your website already ranks, things will be easier. But if you are just starting with your SEO efforts, it will take several months before you see results.
