Why you should ask your customers for feedback

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of Keywords People Usecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years.

Hello, this is episode 83 of SEO is not that hard. In this episode, I'm going to talk about why you should ask your customers for feedback. Now I know if you're up to go. I talked about trying to get views from your customers about your website for the purpose of social proof and promotion. This is slightly different. This is where we're actually trying to get real, honest feedback from customers to find out what we can learn about our site, the things that we might not be doing so well, the suggestions for ways we might improve. This is today.

The reason I'm talking about this today is because I've just got off a demo call, an onboarding call, with one of our paid customers. Their question was they want to know how to get the most out of Keywords People Use and how to use it best with their clients and on their own websites. These calls what I did were fascinating because it lets me not just have a one way where I just said this is how you should do it. It actually helps me see the questions that somebody has about how they might use the site and then also let's me discover the kind of things that they want to do with the site that we don't do so. For example, we were discussing the process to get the most out of keywords people use, which is you start by having seed keywords that you put in, you do some searches, you gather some questions on. People also ask and Google to complete and all the various keyword searches that we can do how you save those keywords into lists, onto keyword lists that we provide, and then how you can take those keywords that you found and then cluster them and as part of the clustering process, that's where we individually query Google for every one of the keywords that you want to cluster and we look to see which keywords have URL results in common. This allows us to find all those keywords clustered together because they have similar results on Google when you search for them. So this shows us these are all keywords that could be answered by the same piece of content, all the same related pieces of content. So that builds our clusters.

Now, once this clustering process is done, we create a beautiful visualization. If you've not seen what one looks like, I would say look on Twitter. I've been posting some animated gifs of these visualizations recently, but these clearly show in a visual form how all different keywords relate to each other, how many URLs they've got in common, and it actually structures them out. It looks almost like a galaxy, sort of a diagram of all these galaxies together and you can zoom in on each galaxy, which is each cluster, and then you can see all the keywords in there. I obviously also have this ability to download the clusters as a CSV format and see the text representations. But this visualizations really make it sort of instantly clear how all the different keywords related to each other, how all the clusters are, and makes you able to start visualizing how you're gonna create content.

And the customer I was speaking with they said, oh, how can I share this with my clients? And that was like an instant. Well, you can't, but at the moment obviously you could do screenshots. You can share them keyword lists by downloading. You can download CSVs of just the cluster keywords, but the real power and the real thing will be great for sharing with a client I can completely see is in the cluster visualizations, so that's an immediate new feature as far as we're concerned. That's like wow, hang on, this makes sense. It's not occurred to us as developers and as owners of the product that people might want to share like that. I mean, it's obvious once someone points out to you, but it just wasn't to us. So that's now immediately gone straight into our backlog as a feature request and it's something that we will implement. You know, immediately went back to Spatialy developer and he was like yep, that's a really good idea. So you can expect that to be in the product soon.

But the key thing here that I'm trying to get across is that it's only by talking to customers and getting their honest feedback and running them through your product that you actually get to find these real nuggets that aren't obvious otherwise. And obviously we're a SaaS product software as a service product so we have customers that pay to use the product on a subscription basis. Now you may have a website that is monetized by display ads or affiliate ads, so you don't want to have a direct customer, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be trying to get in front of some people who are real users of your site. So when I say customers, you could say users as well. And if you can get in front of people and speak to them and run them through the site and ask them how they might use it, and just listen to see if they bring up things oh, can I do that or how do I do this? Now you could just, you know, get friends in, get somebody you know in and try and run them through the site. One word of warning there people who know you personally are less likely to give you bad news, so they're less likely to say things that don't work. So you might specifically have to sort of prompt them to say I really want proper, honest truth. If it's awful, it's awful, tell me it's awful. If something's missing, it's missing, tell me it's missing. That's one way of doing it.

There are actually services out there where you can actually get people who will record themselves testing your site. A couple of examples of services that do this for you is user testingcom and userbraincom. With these you can just go online, set up a test you put in, like the website that you want to be tested, and some tasks that you want people to try and attempt, and then you'll get back a bunch of videos of people actually going through your website, talking about what they're trying to do, and you can watch the video of them either achieving or not achieving what it is that you want them to do. Obviously, you have to pay for each season. The prices vary, but you can get real great feedback from these people because they're not friends, you know, and they'll give you honest feedback.

But the very best is actually to get hold of someone where you can have a two-way conversation if possible. Like I said, it's easier if you actually have a product where you have customers who are actually paying you, because you've got those contact details to people already and obviously that's like the gold standard if you can get it. But yeah, you'll never ever get feedback on a product like you will from somebody who is fresh to it and unrelated to you. Like I say, I've come away with just that one example today, but there was a few other things just in showing them how to use the product where I could see that it wasn't clear and there's things that we can do better to help the sort of process workflow go through on that. So but yeah, I would just say, whatever you do, if you're website you're running, never look at it in isolation. Always look at it in terms of trying to get as feedback from as many people as possible, because it will really inform how you develop and grow your site.

Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools at Keywords People, use that you can book a free, no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I'll show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up. Once again, that's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps.

Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at keywordspeopleusecom To get an instant hit of more SEO tips. Then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at channel five on Twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleusecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.