June 25th, 2010 by Mike

Customer loyalty is an old-fashioned term to apply to the net. Not very many businesses seem to think of it. Some may think in terms of return traffic or repeat custom, but only very rarely do businesses focus on ways to make their customers loyal to them.

Loyalty is something that can have a major impact on your site’s search engine optimization. This is one area that many sites overlook when performing their optimisation, thinking that return traffic can’t really do much for them. This always proves to be a big mistake. Ignore the needs of your site’s users, and your ranking will eventually go down.

When you’re working on your search engine optimisation plan, it’s all too easy to focus only on your business needs. After all, you’re undergoing massive amounts of work to benefit your business. The unfortunate outcome of this is often that a site’s loyal users get left behind. Content becomes more about keywords than communication.

Not every site has loyal users, but every site should want them. Even if your business doesn’t rely on repeat custom, your website can benefit from it. Return traffic can boost your SEO, as the search engines tend to take it as a good sign. If your site fails to draw repeat visits, bounces users back to the search pages or fails to keep users on pages for long enough, the search engines could give it a bad ranking. This is a fairly serious consequence for failing to keep users happy.

Obtaining repeat traffic is not an easy thing, but there are things you can do to nurture loyalty in your site’s visitors. Good content is the basic requirement for this. As part of your search engine optimisation plan, you should be planning to provide your site with a source of constant, quality, fresh content, and it’s best to make this content relevant to your visitors. Creating a sense of community on your site is another way to encourage internet users to return, as is publicly replying to customer queries on the site.

When it comes to repeat traffic, the primary thing to keep in mind is value. If a site is valuable to your users, they will return. This doesn’t mean monetary value. In fact, sites that try to lure repeat traffic through offering things that are of financial benefit usually find their schemes backfiring in distrust. When it comes to the internet, the sort of value you need to think about is the quality of information you offer, its usefulness and the way that you offer it. Talk to us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk about information and your site’s content.

The technical nature of SEO can mean that site owners get bogged down in detail. This can be damaging to the general health of the site. Even optimisation professionals can be occasionally guilty of this. It is important, however, to take the time every now and then to stand back and look at your site from a user perspective. This can result in a better-rounded, profitable site.

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