Are Sales Profile Pages Good for SEO?
Does adding employee bios and photos help SEO? Here, we discuss the impact of showcasing your sales team on your website.
Video Transcript
David: All right. Dave asked us a question in absentia, but I thought it was worth answering here. Let me just read what he asked. He says years ago, I pitched an idea to my partner about having bios and pictures of our sales staff on our website. From a brand perspective, I think this adds value since we’re a family-owned and operated company with a long history, and the majority of our sales staff have been on the roster for a decade or at least five years. I feel it would also impact our brand engagement as current and prospective customers can reach out directly to the member of the sales team to find their info to follow up directly if needed. Not to forget, it’s a decent way to generate leads. We would have professional headshots from our staff posted on the website with contact info and location info, which would also help promote a cohesive brand image. A question for you: how do you think this would impact our SEO results? To put it bluntly, does Google like a personal touch when it comes to showing employees’ faces on the website? I initially thought about this idea when comparing our site’s website to that of a car dealership with local dealers. Just thought I’d ask about this.
David: Okay, so that’s a very interesting question. Let me give you a blunt answer to your blunt question. Your blunt question is, does Google like a personal touch when it comes to showing employees’ faces on the website? The blunt answer is Google doesn’t give a **** about that. Right? Will this help my SEO? What does SEO mean here? It’s not going to help your other page rank for your keyword, right? Or get traffic because of this. It might bring traffic from people on your sales page, such as people like, “Oh, I met so and so at the networking event. What was his company’s name?” And they Google the guy, the sales dude’s name they met. Right? So, it can help bring branded traffic to the site. On each of these profiles, I would not allow people to directly contact the salespeople. I would push them through your main contact form or your phone number on your site because you want to track all the leads. Even if it’s leads to so and so – the salesperson for 10 years. So, maybe it’s like clicking this button to get to our contact form and telling us who you want to get in touch with, and we’ll put you in touch with Bubba, right? It doesn’t really help your SEO, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a valuable page, right?
David: There are certain pages every website needs. It needs a contact page, but the contact page isn’t an SEO page. Right? We’re not trying to rank it and necessarily bring traffic to it. It’s the purpose of the site. Right? The About Us page is another page that’s not an SEO page, even though I’ve noticed that when people contact me, they inevitably go through my About Us page first. They want to know who I am before they contact me. But they’re not landing on the About Us page. They’re landing on an SEO page, and they’re going to the About Us saying, do I trust this guy? Does he have any idea what he’s doing? Then they go to content. The About Us page is not an SEO page. And I’d say this page is not an SEO page. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth it. It’s probably worth it a lot because of all the reasons you say. Yes, it says look at all these friendly faces who could help. I can look, and I can say, oh, this person looks like me, and I’d like to work with them. Right? This person is someone I can relate to. This is the person I met at the networking event, and I would like to talk to them. There are all kinds of great advantages. You might get some extra traffic if that salesperson is well-known enough or out networking enough. But this isn’t going to help your site’s SEO. It won’t help you rank for a keyword. It won’t help you get more traffic or leads from a keyword. But it’s probably an important part of the process of working with your company. So, forget about the SEO. Just build the page. I think it’s a good idea. It’s not anything that would hurt you. I think it’s only a good thing to see that there are real people and to see their experiences. Right? Show off a little bit of personality, that they’re not just a salesperson. They like to go fishing, and they like to basketweave, and they unfortunately root for North Carolina basketball, whatever it might be that they want to do. Right? Just add some flavor to it. But yeah, it’s not really an SEO page, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth putting it on there.
