With organ­ic search con­tin­u­ing to be a large part of many dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing strate­gies, cus­tomer-cen­tric mar­ket­ing prin­ci­ples have nev­er been more impor­tant. Pro­vid­ing val­ue with­in the search engine results can help dif­fer­en­ti­ate your brand from the com­pe­ti­tion. Organ­ic search strate­gies need to evolve in order to deliv­er cus­tomer val­ue at the right time – at the Zero Moment of Truth.

The web has changed many of our pre­con­cep­tions of mar­ket­ing. The once naïve and eas­i­ly swayed mar­ket seg­ment­ed buy­er has been replaced with a new type of con­sumer who is always “con­nect­ed” and nev­er will­ing to com­pro­mise. They pos­sess instant access to a wealth of infor­ma­tion both with­in the research phase but also at the point of pur­chase.

Peo­ple are increas­ing­ly mak­ing web-informed deci­sions at mul­ti­ple stages of the pur­chas­ing cycle; what research from Google calls “the Zero Moment of Truth” or ZMOT for short. It is the pre­cise moment when they have a need, intent, or ques­tion they want answered online. Increas­ing­ly,  it is becom­ing the job of dig­i­tal mar­keters to be part of that con­ver­sa­tion; no one more so than the mod­ern SEO prac­ti­tion­er.

Over the past few years SEO has con­tin­ued to come under pres­sure to deliv­er results in an increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult and com­plex envi­ron­ment. As dig­i­tal chan­nels mature, cus­tomers are demand­ing that brands deliv­er prod­ucts that under­stand and meet the val­ues of the customer’s real­i­ty.

Thinking Differently About Organic Search

To do this we need to think dif­fer­ent­ly about ele­ments of our dig­i­tal strat­e­gy. Take reviews for exam­ple.

After rec­om­men­da­tions from fam­i­ly and friends, reviews are the most trust­ed source of infor­ma­tion online. Stats reveal that 47 per­cent of Britons have reviewed prod­ucts online, which sug­gests there is no short­age of peo­ple ready to pro­vide their opin­ions.

Reviews can elim­i­nate any doubts poten­tial cus­tomers may have about a prod­uct, help prod­uct selec­tion, and ulti­mate­ly increase con­ver­sions, some­thing Kia have made the most of. Here’s what John Bache, Kia head of cus­tomer com­mu­ni­ca­tions, had to say about reviews:

With cus­tomer research mov­ing online, we want­ed to adapt to that. We knew that cus­tomers were hap­py with our prod­ucts, and we want­ed to har­ness that. It was a leap of faith to some extent, but if peo­ple want to find reviews online they are there some­where. We’d rather pro­vide them and keep peo­ple on our site.

Traf­fic to the Kia web­site grew by 21 per­cent year-on-year as a result of the cam­paign, while vis­its to deal­er web­sites rose by 72 per­cent. The pow­er of deliv­er­ing val­ue to users can’t be ignored.

Har­vest­ing reviews off site through soft­ware such as Reviews.co.uk or Reevoo to offer cus­tomers a third-par­ty source of infor­ma­tion on prod­uct sat­is­fac­tion to help sim­pli­fy the cus­tomer pur­chase deci­sion. Using an inde­pen­dent third par­ty the rewards can be even greater, Reevoo claims to deliv­er an aver­age increase in con­ver­sion of 100 per­cent on reviews host­ed with their exter­nal plat­form.

The role of SEO is to deliv­er this val­ue at the search results lev­el. Uti­liz­ing new tech­nolo­gies such as schema to deliv­er rich snip­pets with­in SERPs or third par­ty plat­forms to dis­play reviews can open us new doors that have been pre­vi­ous­ly unex­plored by many. Organ­ic search tac­tics like this allow SEOs to deliv­er a strat­e­gy that can impact a greater num­ber of poten­tial buy­ers could be influ­enced with­in the pur­chase fun­nel from this ear­ly stage.

As Patrick Hong said in a recent arti­cle here on Momen­tol­ogy:

The chal­lenge for brands will be to mobi­lize the resource, skills and tech­nol­o­gy need­ed to ensure sen­ti­ment with­in organ­ic search and con­sumer review por­tals comes across not only in a pos­i­tive way, but with a con­sis­tent­ly exem­plary lev­el of rec­om­men­da­tion.

Where Next?

Cus­tomer reviews are just one piece of the puz­zle. There are a host of areas where organ­ic search can be used to deliv­er val­ue to the con­sumer, from strate­gic con­tent place­ments and enhanc­ing the vis­i­bil­i­ty of PR out­puts to opti­miz­ing load speed and the ease of cus­tomer jour­ney, we can look beyond sim­ple traf­fic gen­er­a­tion and to solv­ing cus­tomer prob­lems with a view to con­ver­sion through val­ue cre­ation rather than “play­ing the num­bers.”

If organ­ic search is to con­tin­ue to be a focus with­in dig­i­tal strat­e­gy, we need to get smarter with our appli­ca­tion; we need to start deliv­er­ing val­ue where it mat­ters: the cus­tomer.