Are you interested in improving your SEO efforts? Because organic search traffic from Google and other search engines can make up around 50% of an average website traffic, it’s a good idea to focus your efforts on SEO.
Modern search engine optimization doesn’t only revolve around optimizing the internal components of the site to fit Google’s guidelines. A huge part of SEO is producing great content that people want to interact with and providing a great user experience on the website.
While technical site enhancements build a solid SEO foundation, regularly publishing valuable content establishes subject authority in search results, fulfilling demand instead of gaming algorithms. Earning rankings now prioritizes understanding audience intents through empathy, then addressing nuanced needs – a tenet of marketing now deep-rooted in SEO strategy.
Beyond optimizations for crawling and indexing, a huge part of SEO is producing great content that solves problems and provides utility, aiming to improve user experience at every opportunity.
Though compliance with search engine guidelines lays groundwork, ultimately SEO rewards relevance, so producing great content focusing on human needs ahead of only machine comprehension drives sustainable organic growth.
If you want to get to the point where you produce great SEO content faster, you’ll need to get feedback from your customers. Let’s explore how surveys can help you with that.
The Role of Surveys in SEO
Search engine optimization is a very multidirectional discipline. You have to master plenty of jobs to be an effective SEO specialist, and most of them differ quite a lot.
The most basic SEO task you should do for your website is optimizing the internal structure. To do this, you should:
- Create semantic URLs that are easy to understand for both Google bots and users;
- Ensure key pages aren’t blocked by robots.txt;
- Ensure you don’t have duplicate content on any of the pages or tags;
- Ensure the website loads within a couple of seconds and all the key elements are loaded first;
- Create structured data for your website and submit it to Google.
Even though these tasks are quite hard to do manually, there are multiple online tools that help you analyze your website for SEO mistakes and provide ways to fix them. Look into Semrush alternatives, these are the SEO tools that can take care of most of the technical tasks in SEO.
Apart from this basic optimization, there are three things that you have to do to improve your SEO: create great content, create a great user experience on the site, and build links and mentions to your website.
These three things help your site rank for hundreds of keywords and bring in a lot more traffic that you can try to convert. And while running a survey on your site wouldn’t directly influence SEO, surveys can help you understand what your audience wants to see. This will have a profound impact on each of these three SEO tasks.
To do this, you can use both surveys on the website and surveys in your email newsletter. Website surveys help you catch visitors as they interact with your site and gauge their opinions on the spot. Running surveys in the newsletter lets you understand the perspective of your customers or people who are otherwise genuinely interested in the content you produce or the services you offer.
How to Use Surveys for SEO
What data do you want to get from surveys, and how to use it to benefit your SEO efforts? Let’s explore the three key areas where surveys can help you optimize your website better.
Understand your audience better
One of the most important things that surveys can do for your SEO is to give you a better understanding of your audience. Mostly, you’re interested in how good of an experience they’re having on the site.
Having a great user experience doesn’t influence SEO directly, but it leads to consequences that do have a large impact on SEO. For instance, a website that is easy to interact with will on average have a much lower bounce rate and more dwell time on the site. These two factors can influence your SEO efforts.
An integral part of a great UX is having all the website components load fast and be displayed properly. This is actually a direct ranking factor under Google’s Core Web Vitals.
By running surveys, you can improve UX, and that will improve SEO as well, effectively killing two birds with one stone.
Now, how do you go about doing that? Here, you can run both longer surveys with your email list and brief polls on the website.
The smaller on-site surveys are best to be kept to a single question. This ensures more people who are just browsing your site will finish it. So, for instance, you could show a brief poll that asks if everything is working fine on the website for people who visit it for the first time. For negative answers, include the option to leave a comment on what doesn’t work.
You won’t get a lot of responses from people who are satisfied with your site, but you might get a few responses from dissatisfied visitors. This will give you an idea of how to improve your site’s navigation or performance to improve UX.
If you decide to work with your email list on this issue, ask questions like:
- When you’re using the site, is everything easy to find?
- Is there a website component you feel frustrated about?
- Does the website load properly every time you use it?
- Have you encountered any bugs on the website?
Since it’s a survey of people already interested in your business, you can ask more questions, typically under ten, and ask open-ended questions. If possible, make open-ended answers optional to make sure more people finish the survey.
You can also get the subscribers’ opinions on the content you produce. Since your newsletter subscriber base represents your core audience, their thoughts on what type of content you produce are important. Consider asking whether they’re happy with the content quality on the blog and what topics they would like to see covered.
With this information, you can both improve the usability of your site that can improve search optimization, and find new content ideas that can be turned into articles that rank well.
Match Your Content to Search Intent
When a user searches for something on Google, they have an intent in mind — they want to find specific information. Sometimes, it’s not very clear what exactly they’re looking for from the keyword they use. For instance, when a person is searching for “affiliate programs,” do they want a list of programs, some advice on how to join one, or a general explanation of what they are?
To make sure you understand the search intent of keywords you rank for, try running a survey on the blog pages. Ask questions like:
- Did you find what you were looking for on this page?
- Did the article answer your Google search query?
- Was the content helpful?
- What can be improved?
Use the feedback you get to change individual blog pages to answer search intent perfectly. This will increase click-through rates, dwell time, and might earn you some backlinks.
So, we’re talking about optimizing the internal components of the site like making those behind-the-scenes tweaks to sync up with what users are really after. Take that feedback, sprinkle it on your pages, and you’ll get a site that speaks the language of your users’ search queries like it’s holding a secret conversation. Smooth sailing for better clicks and longer stays.
Fill your SEO content with unique statistics
An extremely important factor in SEO is the number and the quality of links you build. The most sure way to build a lot of links without having to reach out to multiple blogs per month is to create original content that nobody else can provide.
Running a survey with your audience can be a great way to create your own study. Publish it and promote it through different channels. Then, you’ll get a lot of people linking to it from articles of their own.
Now, what exactly you want to show with that study depends on your type of business and your target audience. A good idea might be to gather the opinions of your audience on certain topics from their industry or their takes on industry trends.
Another form of website surveys involves paid surveys, which are commonly employed by major companies as a part of their pre-launch strategies for significant integrations and, naturally, for SEO advertising campaigns. Nevertheless, it is crucial to exercise moderation and avoid excessive utilization of these surveys.
Summary
Running a survey won’t help your SEO directly. But it will help your SEO efforts in not just one but three key areas.
It will provide you with insight into your website’s optimization for the users, it will give you a better understanding of your content and how users interact with it, and it will help you build links.
All of these factors will ensure you improve important metrics like bounce rate, dwell time, engagement rate, Core Web Vitals, and others that directly influence your rankings.
