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The primary reason for using a chatbot in business is to optimize communication with prospects and customers. A bot can provide 24/7 support to your audience, thus ensuring that they receive help right when they need it. This can significantly improve customer experience, satisfaction, and loyalty. It can also reduce churn rates and help you capture more leads with less effort.
But there is another side to the coin. Although it can make your customers happy, a bot can also do a lot of harm to your search engine optimization and rankings. Namely, it can reduce loading speed, increase bounce rates, and so on. This happens most often when it’s not implemented the right way.
Due to the potential hazards, it’s crucial to implement bots with SEO in mind. In the guide below, we will give you five simple yet effective tips to create a truly SEO-friendly chatbot that will complement your strategy and cause no harm. Let’s dive in!
5 Tips for an SEO-Friendly Chatbot
Consistently Track Your Site’s Rankings
The first trick doesn’t have anything to do directly with optimizing or setting up your bot. However, it’s one of the most crucial tips for creating an SEO-friendly chatbot.
In order to ensure that your bot doesn’t hinder your site’s rankings, you need to start monitoring your position in SERPs on a regular basis. You can use the handy SE Ranking Rank Tracker for this purpose. The tool lets you track your rankings in all search engines and quickly informs you of any issues that might be there.
By tracking your positions, you will be able to spot what’s happening to your website. If you see your rankings drop, it means there might be a mistake with the implementation of your chatbot. If you know there is a problem, you can audit your pages, define exactly what is hindering your results, and come up with an effective solution.
Optimize Your Bot for Relevant Keywords
Keywords are crucial for SEO. With their help, the target audience can discover your content, turn into leads, and then, hopefully, become actual buyers. But why do keywords matter for your bot?
In a nutshell, keywords enable your chatbot to handle situations when users disrupt the typical flow of the conversation. Specific queries allow the system to recognize and understand users’ messages and respond to them accordingly. So, the more relevant keywords you add, the more intelligent your bot becomes and the better user experience it can deliver.
Keywords can benefit you in a number of ways:
- Help create a more natural conversation;
- Allow you to provide automatic responses to disrupted messages;
- Provide users with the information that’s not otherwise included in the flow;
- Help guide visitors back to the conversation’s flow, etc.
To gain all these benefits, optimize your bot for relevant keywords. An easy way to do this is by leveraging Google Search Console. It can be a powerful tool for your keyword research. With its help, you can easily discover the most trending queries and make your website shine in SERPs.
Check the Site’s Speed
If you are not new to SEO and search engine rankings, you probably know that website loading speed is one of the direct factors Google uses to assess a website and define its position in SERPs. According to Google’s Core Web Vitals, the perfect site speed should be 2.5 seconds or less - this is the speed that should enable Google to put your pages higher in results. But did you know that bots can hinder this metric?
Most often, businesses decide to start using a chatbot to streamline and speed up their communications with prospects and customers. However, they don’t know that they can significantly hurt the loading time, especially when the script isn’t implemented properly.
In order to avoid this issue and keep your ranking high, you need to optimize the work of your bot. First of all, check your site’s current speed with tools like PageSpeed Insights to see if there are any mistakes. If yes, ensure that you use the right code. It’s important that actions performed by bots (such as sending pings or initiating a conversation) are routed by external servers. When they work asynchronously with your site, they won’t be able to hinder your loading speed and will positively influence your SEO.
Test Your Chatbot on Mobile
It is no secret that mobile devices have been trending for many years. Appreciating the convenience of browsing the web on the go, more and more users have been switching to mobile. However, this didn’t directly affect rankings for some time.
Addressing the growing proportion of mobile users, in 2019, Google adopted a revolutionary mobile-first indexing. The new indexing approach implies that Google will use the mobile version of every website to rank its pages for search results, not only for smartphones but also for desktops.
This changed the whole approach to search engine optimization and put mobile optimization in the foreground. And it remains there, which is why optimizing your chatbot for mobile is a must.
As of now, a huge part of your visitors access your site from mobile devices, so you want them to be able to use your bot easily and conveniently. To make this real, you need to carefully test how it performs on small screens and make the necessary improvements to ensure that nothing spoils the user experience. You can easily do it with a Mobile-Friendly Test.
Keep an Eye on Your Engagement and Bounce Rates
When integrating a chatbot into a website, most businesses set up some kind of ping notifications. Most often, these messages say something like “I’m here to assist you,” “Got some questions?” etc. The core purpose of these notifications is to capture users who spend some time on your site and initiate a conversation with them to give them more information, answer their questions, and, hopefully, convert them into leads. But although this tactic can indeed boost lead generation, it can also have an adverse effect.
Sometimes, visitors may find the messages that pop out of the blue rather annoying. In this situation, your bot can start playing against you, decreasing engagement and increasing bounce rate. So, our final tip is crucial for making a truly SEO-friendly chatbot.
To identify if there is a problem, you should constantly keep an eye on your engagement and bounce rates. An engagement rate is a metric used to define what share of your audience actively engages with your pages. The higher it is, the better. A bounce rate, on the contrary, determines the percentage of visitors who leave your site after seeing only one page. This one should be kept low.
Also, you should keep an eye on the dwell time. This metric indicates how much time new visitors spend on your site after discovering it in SERPs. It can also tell you a lot about the impression you make on your prospects.
By closely watching these metrics, you will be able to detect any engagement issues and address them timely and adequately. An easy way to track them is with the help of GA4 (Google Analytics 4). The tool will provide you with accurate insights into your site’s performance with all the important metrics.
Conclusion
Intelligent AI-powered bots have long earned the attention and affection of businesses. They provide an opportunity to streamline the communication between businesses and customers (as well as prospects) and hold plenty of other benefits. At the same time, they can affect your rankings in both a positive and negative way.
After reading this guide, you now have a complete set of tips for making an SEO-friendly chatbot that will contribute to your success. So be sure to track your rankings regularly, optimize for keywords, improve loading speed, and use other tips from this article to earn high positions in SERPs and the loyalty of your audience!