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User Engagement SEO: Tips to Increase it and The Best Tools to Track


We all want the peak engagements on our blogs, websites, social media handles; you name it.
More often than most people think, that creation is the principal for solid engagements.
What they forget is, the old Skool strategy was more focused on sales, numbers, and viewers, but now things have changed. Modern marketing has brought a new wave of engagement.
Real engagement happens when your customer realizes value from your products or service. For instance, to bring A-game to your niche market, engage more like a human than a bot with your audience.
People have become more robust and contemplating due to the rise in social media, immediate news, and information which is just a click away. It's critical to converse in your customer's language for better engagement.
This way, your SEO strategy amalgamates with your user's needs. All their questions and doubts will be examined. That's how your engagement rates will increase.
But before going into the nitty-gritty details, let's understand what user-engagement is?
In simple words, it's the ability to continue to pique customers' interest in your website or blog. Sometimes, even on social media and other channels.
In mathematical terms, it shows the percentage of users who are actively engaged with your products.
With billions of websites and engagement platforms on the web, it's crucial to keep an eye on your customers' engagement rate.
As marketers, we often come across these questions in our minds: How can I measure my engagement rates? How can I fill in the loopholes? And what are the best tools to do this?
Businesses spend a sheer amount of time in the building, strategizing and distributing. But when it comes to estimating the return on engagement activities, everything converts into worry.
Yes, it's hard because your brand is growing, and so is your user-engagement base. Regardless of this situation, learning a few internal and external metrics will help you in the long-run.

Importance of User Engagement on SEO


We will go deep into why user engagement is vital in SEO?
We understand that there's a lot that goes into executing SEO services for websites and businesses. So, we can say these tips barely scratch the surface.
As per stats, 54% of customers think that companies need to change their way of engaging. This shows that it's essential to consider all other factors to measure the right type of interaction.
Let's say you're talking to your friend, and every time you converse with him, he wants to confess what's going on in his life without lending an ear.
We can say that's a very biased approach to friendship. Nowadays, brands act like that one friend who is never ready to listen. In other words, to give your brand a recognized face and voice, it's necessary to engage and build trust.
It doesn't matter if you create the world's best content. Instead, what matters is how well you treat your audience and engage. We have explained the importance of user engagement in SEO in these four points:

1. It Gets You Holy Grails of Loyal Fans

First, engage like a human, then build a loyal fan base.
People love to talk, express and share. Give them a chance to do it all with your brand. If they can relate to your daily content, your products and believe that they are part of something big, you won.
For example: If you're a shoe brand, ask your customers what shoes they found best for the gym? Start a conversation, talk about their interests.
In particular, organizing social media events is one good idea.
Twitter events like this one can help you engage better and start a two-way conversation. Likewise, you're not just talking but also listening to your customers.

2. It Rescues You from the Faux Pass

There are few downsides to not engaging with your audience. You can often avoid serious blunders with your brand.
For example: Avoid capitalizing on serious matters or any political matters. This leaves a doubtful impression on your brand. It also attracts unwanted attention to your business.
Too often, brands focus on themselves and get a little disconnect from their audience's needs.
The best thing you can do is engage, listen to your customers' feedback and consistently create quality content.
You shouldn't be surprised to see the recent stats. It suggests that engagement is often influenced by price (81%), quality (80%), and convenience (55%) (quality matters).

3. You Will Get Better Rankings

One of the biggest advantages of engagement with SEO is the increased rankings. Google loves those websites and brands that love their customers.
If you create a new product, share it with your audience on your social media handles. When you add any on-site content piece, alarm your audience with the help of newsletters.
Create shareable and promotional content on YouTube. In the end, encourage your audience to share it on their social handles.
Stats suggest that 70% of marketers believe that interactive content is the key to good engagement.
So, go ahead and make sure you never leave your audience behind at any step.

4. The Audience Will find You Even in the Crowd

Your targeted audience must find you on the overcrowded web.
It's crucial to remember, your website is like a home for your fans, but you can't forget your other social media channels. The importance of omnichannel presence is still underrated.
Stats suggest that companies with omnichannel presence enjoy an 89% customer retention rate.
If you include your social media banners on your site, your audience can easily shift from your home (your website) to socials.
This means you have more chances to showcase your brand. Here are a few ideas on how you can engage with your fans if they are not in the stands:

  • Invite your fans by showing sign-boards for your social media channels.
  • Explore more options like widgets on your website, links to contest, and promotions.
  • Clean and clear CTAs to your other channels work great. For example: check out square sayings.

List of Top User Engagement KPIs to Measure


The modern marketing paradigm lies in your customer experiences and satisfaction. Considering this, excellent customer support level up your business growth.
There's a reason why measuring KPIs is valuable. Often it helps to keep track of numbers and fetch some concrete data. It also bridges the gap between your expectations and your customers' engagement rates.
Check out these metrics to measure user engagement KPIs :

1. First Response Time

No one prefers waiting, not even your customers.
The delay in responding to your customers' queries results in high bounce rates.
On average, 59% of customers say they are more likely to buy from a brand when they receive answers to their queries within a few minutes.
In simple words, it's related to your customers' satisfaction metrics. The lesser the response time for your customers' queries and your agents' answers, the higher your scores.
These metrics are useful for measuring KPIs. It helps your customers to be on the same page with you. It also encourages your agents to solve queries effectively.
It informs you about your team's efforts and also how prompt they are in their work.
Considering this result, you can learn whether your team is sufficient or not with KPI metrics' help.

2. Customer Retention Rate (CTR)

As per Brandongaille, 12-15% of loyal customers can generate 55-70% of sales to a single retailer.
Often companies focus on acquisition more than customer retention. It's good never to underestimate the power of your foregoing customer base.
Do you know the value of a lost customer is $243 globally?
The good news is, you can create a high CRR rate with good customer experiences. If you're doing a marvelous job in providing consistent value to your customers, then it's all worth it.
A pragmatic approach to an excellent customer retention rate is to measure and compare the metrics of your past CRR to your current one. Thus, KPI can help you understand your goals.
Even a slight boost of 5% CRR can kick off your profits by 25% to 95%.
These stats should be enough to convince you that CRR should be a significant part of user engagement analysis.

3. Customer Satisfaction Score

Customer satisfaction score is not a new phenomenon but an obvious one.
Satisfied customers provide both financial and moral support to your company. There's no denial in this fact.
It is also known as your CSAT score, where real-time feedback from your customers is collected. This survey helps in measuring KPI and boosting brand reputation and popularity.
Your CSAT score can make or break your brand. Consider different ways to collect your CSAT scores like feedback reports, ratings, and reviews.
This way, it helps you to stimulate a good CSAT score for your brand. These days brands need to be advocates, and high customer satisfaction scores help you become one.

4. Counts of Page Views

Pageviews are the number of views on your different pages whenever anyone lands on your site. It can help you understand how often people visit your pages.
Higher the views, more satisfied and content customers are with your website content.
This metric is most comfortable to measure. Since if there is a repeated page view of a single page, it is counted in by Google.
The number of pages a user views per session is an important gauge. This helps you to understand if your content is valuable and compelling or not.
But why does this matter? Often these pages are a way to keep users engaged, value their interest, and encourage them to take the next step.
This shows low-quality engagement doesn't work anymore. Instead, it results in a higher bounce rate and few visitors.

5. Cost Per Conversation

Cost per conversion rate helps you understand the value of your service efforts within the total revenue.
For every business, providing top-notch quality services at low costs is considered profitable. Thus, it's important to understand the customer service metric overtime.
It is important to track viable components like resources, infrastructure, training, and management costs.
In case you find out that the percentage of this metric is pretty high, then it's good to strategize again. It will help you find the gaps to fill.

6. Track of New Vs. Returning Customers

New visitors are those visitors who are navigating your site for the first time. Returning visitors are the people who have visited your site before, but this time they want to see something more.
Now, the question is, how can we calculate KPIs using these metrics? The answer lies in the comparison.
You compare the behavior of returning customers versus the new ones. Also, take the help of all the metrics mentioned earlier.
If your returning visitor metrics are higher than your new users, then it's a good sign. It proves that you do have a loyal fan base.
If the opposite is true, then you need to work to attract people's attention.
The statistic shows that returning visitors have a 75% higher chance of taking any action than a new visitor.
Hence, with these metrics' help, you can expect a higher ROI on your marketing campaigns.

7. Customer Effort Score (CES)

The CES score helps you identify how much effort is gone to please your customers. In simple words, it's used to measure the ease of experience within an organization.
To be precise, you can use this metric to identify how your customers feel about your products. Often, they are asked to rate your products or services on a scale of "very difficult," "easy," or "neither."
Research done on customer attitude mentions if a customer needs to work hard on his problem, then it's a low probability that the customer will purchase from that brand. This means, higher your CES score, the more satisfied your customer.
In short, if you can anticipate your customers' issues with low effort on their side, then you have high chances of doing great in your business.

8. Average Resolution Time

The ART (average resolution time) is also a deciding factor in the user engagement field.
It includes a reply to your customers when they genuinely need you. Offering services in less time and effectively working to untangle their problems.
Generally, there are issue tickets raised by the customers that need to be resolved in a given time frame.
Your Average Resolution Time will vary depending on the difficulty of the customer issue.
When you measure this time as per agent basis, it gives you a clear idea of which agent is taking it longer to close any ticket.
This can also show that your customer support team needs extra training or guidance to solve the issue quickly.
In this case, there are different stages to fix any customer issue. The best part is you can check every stage to determine your ART score.
However, if your resolution time is more, you need to work on your "next issue avoidance" factor.
For example: Let's say a customer issue ticket is solved in the first resolution time. Somehow, he has another issue, and now the case is reopened again.
This case extends the full resolution time, which isn't good from a customer satisfaction perspective.
In other words, the ticket resolution time is affected. These metrics are important factors that constitute an engagement with your users.

9. Pages Scroll Depth

The breakdown of where readers scroll on a page of your website and what they cover in those few minutes is often known as the page scroll depth.
Most visitors scroll down to the page before it loads. This shows that no one reads 100% of your articles, and under 70% of people only see the very top of the page.
This indicates the behavior of your visitors. Those visitors who scroll down on your page want to see your valuable content. This means they want to spend more time and result in higher engagement rates.
It shows which part of your website your audience consumes more. You can track this by keeping an eye on where your audience stops on a page.
It clarifies the point that your content is readable. Also, people want to consume content that interests them.
These metrics are important to track because they are related to customer engagement. Now, let's understand how you can give a boost to all the metrics mentioned above.

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List of Methods You Can Use to Boost the User Engagement Rate


So far, we've covered all about the KPIs. The importance of engagement rate in SEO, and it's crucial to go in-depth with the engagement metrics.
Everyone agrees on the fact that high user engagement leads to high rankings. It shows the high authority of your sites and converts loyal customers into buyers. In short, it helps you inform, build and convert.
So, why not explore new ways to boost up your engagement rates?
Here are the ways you can do so:

1. Take Your Customers to Innovate

Innovation is the key. Surprise, provide and enlighten your audience with innovation. It's often creative to see when customers are a part of your new product innovation.
Building a framework that involves your customers incorporates a user-centric approach. Every new decision you take for your business is based on the same framework.
For example: let's say you're adding one more feature to your product but are not sure about it.
Start a Q/A session with your customers (they are the real thought-leaders in this case).
This will save your time and help your customer feel that they are a big part of your business.
Organizing crowdsourcing as a VoC tool (Voice of the Customer) is a great way to connect with your community. You can have an open discussion with your audience.
This two-way communication not only builds trust but skyrockets your engagement rates.

2. Let the Customer Win

You're pushing out content, making landing pages, and jotting down everything from start to end, and that's great.
But if you let your customers win, get seen and heard, then your business thrives rather than just being good.
Make them happy. Surprise them with greetings, giveaways, and free samples of your new product.
Research suggests one happy customer can let you win dozens of other customers.
Although, 61% of customers believe that surprise gifts and offers are the best way to make them feel special. So, what are you waiting for?
Become a friend first and share their happy moments.
Tweet their birthdays and respect them for their background and demographics. Always be transparent and show your struggles as a brand (never hide in shadows).
People love a brand for its transparency and its best product service.
Think about how you can create offers that will save their money. In short, unsell your services and remember to keep your customers happy.

3. Be Active with the Active Users

You can always decide where you want to put your time and efforts while running a business.
Indeed, acquiring new customers and expanding is key to a full-fledged business. Still, you can't forget the importance of engaging with the always right users in front of your eyes.
Engage with your active users. Yes, comment back when they suggest something useful for your new product. Repeated users are always the ones who make time for your new launch, new feature, and new service.
The ability to segment your audience and then engage is valuable. You can also engage with them in the places where they hang out. Use social media, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and different survey options.
Answer their doubts on Quora and Reddit. This also boosts your engagement with a tailor-made approach.
For your Saas apps, honor them with a demo account for adding tasks, creating and sharing content.
Learn from big giants like Facebook, whose active monthly users are 2.5 billion. Still, they manage to engage back with their audience on every level.

4. Live Chat Option

The advantage of the live chat option for user-engagement is beyond our expectations.
Live chat drives sales, live chat grows awareness, and live chat builds brand loyalty. Even the stats suggest that 51% of customers are more likely to stay or buy from a company that offers live chat support.
You can engage your audiences with occasional live sessions. You can organize informative talks and provide value.
Also, use features like these :

  • Use chat greetings to greet your customers. It's a way to start a conversation with your customers.
  • Make full use of announcements. People love Black Friday offers, new product lists, and discount coupons.
  • One more feature that can streamline your customer engagement efforts is chat routing. It is used to make things easier for your customers. They will reach their desired department on time and engage more on your website.

5. Personalize All Engagement Platforms

In the modern world, engaging with customers is not that easy and not that difficult also.
It's easy for brands who understand the crux of personalization. After all, 74% of customers feel frustrated when a website is not personalized in any manner.
But yes, there's more to personalization than just adding the names of your customers. You can rev up your personalization game by engaging and making it more about your customers.
Start with automating your messages, tweets, adorable product packaging, and even promotional videos.
Companies like Cadbury use personalized forms of video marketing. This is how they shine and stand out from the crowd.
For example, recently, they ran a campaign in Australia. They promoted dairy milk flavor chocolates by creating a personalized video.
They ensured that the limelight is always on their customers. It doesn't matter even if they are new in the Australian market.
Result : When customers saw their video, they nodded their heads and found it relatable (the power of personalization). It also included photos and personal information to entice them. This campaign received a 65% click-through rate and a 33.6% conversion rate.
Takeaway : Personalized videos and stories boost awareness. It helps people to relate and then convert.
Never forget the wealth of customer data you have in one click; instead, use it more profoundly.

6. Encourage Your Customers to Share

Sharing is caring! We all have heard this. But how many businesses encourage their customers to share their stories and speak?
Think about this: You retweet your customer's experiences, and they feel special. Suddenly their thoughts are in front of thousands of other people.
This encourages them to think and reshare your brand's news, products, or experience.
Either way, word of mouth works, and you do get engagement and leads when your customers share "Had a good time at XYZ."
According to Nielsen, 92% of people trust friends' recommendations over any other marketing or advertising type.
There are few ideas on how you can do this:

  • Showcase your user-generated content. Feature them in your latest tweet, article, or blog posts and surprise them.
  • Use the location listings feature. People love to share insights into their life, location, and activities. This way, people can geotag their photos, videos, or any content for your brand.
  • Surprise them, feature their story on your Instagram handles or social media pages. Offer a free trip or a ticket to the new NBA show and micro-blog about their experience. They will share their experience on their handles, and you can do the vice-versa.

Take inspiration from MasterCard, taco bell, and Disney.

7. Run Contests that People Love

People love contests and the process of participation. It's also a token of appreciation for your loyal and active users.
Social rewards and prizes excite your customers. Stats suggest contests with over $1000 or more receive a whopping engagement of 5.8% per follower.
You can hold creative digital contests like Starbucks, #whitecupcontest campaign. In this case, people were asked to submit their cup design on social media.
The prize was to have their design on a limited-edition reusable cup. Interesting! Right?
Nonetheless, people were motivated to share this contest on their handles.

8. AMA Sessions are Key

Everyone needs expert advice, and your customers are not different. Ask me anything is one such feature that you can use to gain three things:

  • Build trust.
  • Transparency, no filters.
  • Brand yourself as an industry expert.

These three points are directly related to high user-engagement rates.
The next time they land on your website or social media, they won't hesitate to pull their wallets out.
You can start with a virtual global summit or events where you have guest speakers. A good Q/A live sessions where customers can ask questions works wonders. You can solve their issue then and there.
It shows that you are an approachable person. You can start one topic, gather questions about it and answer it in the AMA live sessions.
It's an effective way to build a personal relationship with your customers in the online world.

9. Ensure Good Product Experience

Without this, all the points mentioned above will be ineffective.
If you're not ensuring a good product experience, then the harsh truth is you're doing it all wrong.
Now, it's a top priority for all businesses to ensure a good product experience.
Research is done by the Tents group highlights that companies that earn a revenue of $1 billion are expected to make $700 million only if they invest in customer experience in the coming years.
You can come up with innovative customer experience ideas:

  • Your customers are investing their time, and it's your responsibility to invest yours. Offer multiple solutions; you can even prepare a short video for an explanation.
  • Diversify the shipping options in your product service. People don't like to wait, and if your customer service is on point and on time, you're already ahead of many businesses.
  • Collect feedback online and use it to improve your product experience. Ask your customers for feedback, issues, and even some loopholes. They are your best critic and even supporters. So, don't shy away.

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Best Tools to Track the Engagement Rate


Now that you've reached so far, it's important to hand you some actionable tools. It will help you track your engagement rates.
So, take a look at a few of the best engagement tracking tools to track your engagement rates for the future:

1. AgoraPulse

Marketers use this tool for all-in-one social media management. This software saves time and provides effective solutions.
This system currently coalesces five major platforms: LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. It's easy-to-use, accessible, and affordable.
Key-features:

  • Audience engagement
  • Analytics; collect an overview of how things are going for your campaign.
  • UTM code generator
  • Team collaboration: collaborate with the team and make sure you're all on the same page.
  • Best for Social media publishing: create, streamline and publish content.
  • Ad comment management.
  • Social CRMs.

The pricing is based on;

  • Medium: $99 per month.
  • Large: $199 per month.
  • X-large: $299 per month .
  • Enterprise: $499 per month.

2. Brandwatch

It's an analytical tool that is best for small businesses and mid-size businesses. It's a little expensive, but it's still worth it.
It has robust analytical features and a large variety of integration tools. It works best for brand management.
Key-features:

  • Minimal graphics and design elements, so it's easy and straightforward.
  • The dashboard is multilingual, and that's an X factor.
  • Huge tool-kit menu. It helps you to find the location, demographics, categories, tags of your targeted audience.
  • Provide different types of reports to keep track of users.
  • Receive automatic alerts.

The pricing is a little expensive, but in business, investment is worth taking a shot. The latest pricing starts from $1,000 per month.

3. Oktopost

Plan, approve and schedule with ease. This software gives you an edge over others.
Since you can use it for your employee's benefits, marketers often use it to grow their companies' reach beyond social media channels.
Key-features:

  • Extract ideas for your campaign from its content library feature.
  • Automate every new detail with tools like Salesforce, CRM, and Marketo.
  • Analyze your posts from time to time.
  • Stay on the top of every social media trend. Engage with your audience and tap into their life with a little personalization.
  • Get a 360-degree view of customers, their needs, and wants.

Reach your B2B goals with the quote-based plan. Most marketers love its flexible pricing. You can start with a free trial.

4. Aimtell

Aimtell is a software that comes with a push notifications feature. It works wonders when your customers often forget you. Sometimes, you're just one push notification away from them.
It is a must-have tool for e-commerce, marketers, and blogs. You can schedule, automate and send push notifications with ease.
Key-features:

  • Effective Lead generation includes prospecting tools, lead nurturing features.
  • Pipeline management tools.
  • Helps in ROI tracking.
  • Automates social media marketing.
  • Enables sales intelligence and also looks after content/ blogging platforms.
  • Push notifications that involve device targeting, A/B testing.
  • Helps in campaign segmentation.
  • Makes things easier for you by visual notifications, removing expiry notifications.

Its pricing starts from only $29.00/month.

5. Thankbot

It offers a sweet handwritten note for your dear customers.
We have talked so much about personalization, and this software has covered it all. Thankbot thanks your customers with handwritten notes that help your business to stand out.
Key-features:

  • Handwritten notes in the form of visually appealing cards.
  • You select a style that suits your brand's voice, color, and persona.
  • You can type it or write the message you want to send out to your customers.
  • Then sit back, and see the post-delivery within 3-5 days.
  • Write up to 50 words in each note.

You can start with a 6" x 4" card with up to 50 words. The pricing starts from $4.75 per note to $6 per note.

6. Shout About Us

Their name resonates with the type of service they provide. It helps you with customer feedback management. It manages all your feedback in one place.
You generate, listen and engage, and they do all the behind-the-scenes work.
Key-features:

  • Custom features that address the specific needs of different businesses.
  • Automated systems.
  • Request reviews from 100+ sites.
  • Industry-specific response templates.
  • Respond directly from email/app.
  • Response error notifications.
  • Review escalation procedures.

The pricing fits all types of budgets. It starts from $30-$50 per month.

7. FreshDesk

They deliver exceptional customer service. Perfect for mid-size, remote customer service and SMP people.
If you're looking for self-serving solutions for your customers, then Freshdesk is for you.
Key-features:

  • Track and manage inbox support tickets from multiple channels.
  • Set deadlines for specific resolutions and save time.
  • It includes email, chatbots to resolve every issue raised on any platform.
  • Manage your field workforce.
  • Increase your team productivity.
  • Security prone

The pricing starts from $15 to $99 based on your business needs.

8. ShieldApp

It helps in generating leads, finding clients, and attracting top talents on LinkedIn. It serves freelancers, small and medium-sized businesses.
It also helps to collect, visualize, and store content. Works best for keeping track of your network expansion and applies custom labels to your social posts.
Key-features:

  • Provide heat-maps.
  • Access control.
  • Lead generation.
  • Key performance indicators.
  • Reporting and reviewing analytics.

Its pricing ranges between $10-$15.

Conclusion

"We see our customers as guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It's our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better", Jeff Bezos.
As marketers, we know that customer engagement is often the result of good customer experiences. It's an emotional connection between the brand and the customer that stands out.
Successful businesses and brands create memorable experiences.
So, create, share, engage and inspire your audience for a successful business for future engagement activities so you can reap the benefits of loyal customers.
Are you looking to increase the user engagement for your website using SEO? Speak to our SEO experts now!

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Joseph Schneider

He has spent more than 12 Years in strategising and executing SEO campaigns. He is interested to writing Digital-marketing, PPC and Social Media Marketing related topics.