What Have You Got Already?

Now that you know how your content is ranking along with the keywords you’re appearing in results for, it’s time to audit that content.

What have you got and what do you need? I find that a lot of clients I work with have content for the start of their marketing funnel — the awareness stage. The rest has been created in a kind of scattergun approach. A bit for returning customers, a couple of email templates that lead prospects to the home page of their website, maybe a blog or two explaining what their business does and why their customers like it.

In terms of your marketing and sales, this can make it difficult to hold the attention of a potential customer long enough to convert them into an actual customer. In terms of SEO, it means your content is showing up for some searches and not others.

A good SEO content plan has assets that speak to all levels of the customer journey. These levels need to be mapped to the search engine’s prediction of searcher intent.

‘Searcher intent?’ I hear you ask. This is the reason behind the question posed to Google, Bing, or any other search engine. Search engines generally break intent into three areas: Do, Know, and Go.

Which Should You Focus on, SEO or SIO?

I’d argue that good SEO is Searcher Intent Optimization (SIO). If you do your content planning and SEO well, you’ll naturally be meeting SIO needs too.

When you’re thinking about searcher intent, you can break it down in a couple of ways. The marketer’s way is to think about it as a funnel — Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Loyalty, Advocacy — or some variation of this. When search engines identify intent, it’s more along the lines of Do, Know, or Go.

What is the searcher trying to get from their query?

Your job is to match your content, very obviously, to the range of intents that a searcher has. You can do this with the marketing funnel — early stages of the funnel match the search engine’s category of ‘Know.’ ‘Do’ is for the engaged searcher who is ready to convert, and ‘Go’ is your loyal customers — they’re comfortable with you and want to go straight to your site. ‘Go’ content should be about delighting these customers. Give them content they can use to become advocates of your brand.

So how do you bring all this back around to creating SEO content for website users? With the words you use.

What phrases and words do people use to find the things they want at the Know-Awareness-Consideration stage of their journey? What about the Do-Conversion-Loyalty stage? Or the Go-Advocacy-Delight stage? What types of content do people typically look for to answer these different needs? You should already know what you’ve got, which in turn lets you know what you need.

Keywords, Topics, and Content Planning

One of the easiest ways to find out what people are searching for on the internet is to ask the internet. There are loads of tools available to find out what words people use to search for things in your niche.

Try checking out places like Answer The Public or playing around with Google Suggest for a while and you’ll start to see inside the Hive’s mind. It all comes down to language when you’re attracting website users and matching the content you’ve made to what they’re looking for.

If you have a team of people working with your content and website, get together for a brainstorm. Everyone uses different words and phrases in their search. A group brainstorm can expose words associated with your brand you’d never considered.

SEO content aims to meet searchers where they are by matching with their language. That includes single and double word phrases along with longtail keywords and queries.

That’s why you hear so much about keywords and topic themes. People use words to communicate with their search engine of choice. Then, the search engine analyses the words they use to try and understand their intent and bring them the content that matches.

Let’s imagine you provide a sales service. You’ll have a bunch of keywords that are related to what you do — sales, B2B, B2C, deal, purchase, profit, prospecting, sales team, salesperson, salesforce, sales and marketing, sales pipeline, and a bunch of others. You’ll want to rank well for these words. Just as important is to match your ideal audience’s queries with your content.

Great content will answer the initial ‘Know-Awareness’ stage with informative content that gives general information about your product or service.

Let’s use the sales service example again. Content fitting this stage of the intent/marketing funnel will answer questions like ‘what are outsourced sales,’ ‘how do outsourced sales work,’ ‘what are the benefits of outsourcing sales.’ Your content should succinctly and thoroughly answer these questions while naturally using appropriate words from your keyword pool.

The Know/Consideration and the Do/Conversion stages of SEO content will be answering questions like ‘What are the best-outsourced sales options for startups,’ ‘why outsourcing sales boost profits,’ ‘which outsourced sales teams are for estate agents,’ ‘choosing outsourced sales for part of your sales pipeline.’

Your Go/Advocacy/Delight stages will be case studies, testimonials, special offers, and more. This content should help your loyal customers promote the service they chose to others and help them feel great about having chosen your service.