Although it started as a digital customer service tool that big companies like AirBnB and Shopify would use, Zendesk has grown in scope. Today, it can be used for customer relationship management, email marketing and live chat through websites among companies of all sizes. This means that it also a great tool that many different businesses can use to promote themselves, especially to obtain greater prominence on search engine results pages (SERPs). Many web marketing professionals will already know that the primary tool available to businesses to improve their web presence is search engine optimisation (SEO).
Of course, SEO has many different forms and people go about it in different ways. Part of why there is a difference in approaches is because of the publishing platform that is being used. For example, Zendesk offers different opportunities to leverage SEO than a straightforward blog publishing platform. Given that content can be provided with Zendesk, albeit in a more customer service-facing kind of way, how does it stack up as a part of a wider digital marketing strategy? Read on to find out why optimising SEO for Zendesk might be in your firm's best interests.
When you start to apply traditional digital marketing methods to Zendesk, all you are really doing is applying it in a more customer-oriented way. The advantage is that you will help to save costs by automating many of the questions you might otherwise need to answer, thereby saving you time and money. Furthermore, businesses that adopt this approach should find that the likes of Google and Bing start to rank their webpages higher. This is because when people stay on pages for longer, it indicates they are finding the information they see both useful and relevant. As you will be providing better quality content on your customer-facing pages, so your SERPs rankings should rise. Even better, they will be targeted on the terms and keywords most associated with the sort of products and services your enterprise offers.
If you already use Zendesk but see SEO as a separate entity and a part of digital marketing only, then you will be missing out on one of the key ways this customer service management tool works. Your competitors could easily be using a twin strategy of optimising content for customer services and products, for example. To keep up with them, you'll need to realise how important this part of the wider strategy is. In addition, creating content for Zendesk that is optimised for key search terms means you could easily start to attract attention from potential new clients who were looking for answers to questions about competitor products but found your content instead.
One of the few known problems with Zendesk and SEO is that content cannot have easily customised meta descriptions, something that most blog posts would have. That said, the sort of content you would create with Zendesk would be different. It is not primarily there for news feeds or blog posts, after all. Secondly, you cannot edit URLs in Zendesk with ease. This will put some people off the platform from an SEO perspective but, again, such a drawback does not outweigh the clear advantages.
Overall, it is best to think of Zendesk SEO as complementing your other digital marketing activities rather than replacing them. Blogs and news posts should still be created, perhaps hyperlinking to your customer-facing pages produced with Zendesk. When you carry out your research for keywords and search terms for your SEO strategy, look at the ones target customers are inputting into their search engines. These will be ideal for your Zendesk content as well as in your on-site and off-site blogs. Remember, too, that site loading speeds are important. Therefore, avoid the temptation to put too much content on one page since slow loading times tend to have a negative impact on SERPs rankings.
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