While it is now well known you need quality content in order for your website to be a success, working out exactly what content can be tricky. A strategy that involves creating content for the sake of it is no strategy at all, but how do you figure out what content you need?
Business-to-business internet marketing firm KoMarketing Associates’ Director of Online Marketing Casie Gillette has identified three places you can look in order to create content your audience wants to read for search engine industry news website Search Engine Land.
Search results
It may sound obvious, but looking at search results will give you a good idea of what content has been done before, what type of content people are searching for and how they are searching for it. Search for potential titles, keyword phrases and topics to see what is out there, what people are asking about and what the search intent is for the keywords you want to target.
Existing content
To understand what kind of content your audience will want to read, you need to understand how visitors journey through your website and subsequently what information they need to help them make a purchase, sign up or whatever it is you ideally would like them to do.
You can do this by setting up conversion paths which will show you how people move through your site and where they drop out of the conversion funnel so you can see if a particular page – and its content – is responsible for a large percentage of exits or conversions.
It is also worth investigating pages with high bounce rate.
Customer needs
Talking to your customers will go a long way in helping you work out what they need and what they want. If possible, talk to them on the phone, but you can also utilise surveys, live chat, user testing tools and your salespeople to gain great insight that will help you with your content strategy.
Creating a successful content strategy is not easy, but by taking the time and making the effort to understand what your audience wants will allow you to create content they actually want to read.
