How useful is your business if no one can find you? With the help of these creative, and SEO-focused tips, you can attract your ideal clients.
One of the biggest struggles most business owners face today is getting the right people to their website. Sure, seeing a lot of traffic on your site can be exciting, but if the correct people — your target audience — aren’t the ones coming to the site, then it’s not going to help increase your income.
Consider this. If you have 500 views per day, but only 20 of those come from people who would use your products or services, your time spent attracting those wrong people is wasted. Finding your target demographic and directing them to your website is the secret to success.
Search engine optimization (SEO) and Content Marketing are frequently used in tandem to help businesses grow organically. With SEO tactics, the goal is to rank high in search engines, in that way, prospects, clients, and customers can find the products and services your business has to offer to result in higher visitor and conversion numbers. The challenging part is figuring out how to make the most of your online presence so that the right people can find you and boost your bottom line.
What is the secret?
Finding content ideas that attract customers
Start with your sales funnel and your current customers
Research Frequently Asked Questions. What questions or inquiries do you get asked or encountered all the time? Finding content ideas may be simpler than you imagine if you ask your audience for suggestions. It only makes sense to start with them as they will be the ones reading and interacting with the content.
- Start by brainstorming the questions you get asked constantly and write them down. There’s a reason people are asking those questions. How do I follow this crochet pattern? What should I be aware of before hiring a brand photographer? If you are asked these questions, you can bet that many people are interested in the answers. Start your list of content ideas with questions you frequently get asked or that you know people want to know before buying from you or hiring you.
- Think about the questions your ideal customer doesn’t know to ask, but still needs to know before purchasing. If you don’t understand what a prospect needs to know before purchasing from you, you’re probably missing out on some great content ideas. Find out what questions consumers have when buying similar goods or services to yours. There may be content ideas here.
- Now think about how your customers use your product or service. Does it require other resource use e.g. tools, software or electricity? Will it require regular attention or servicing? Also, think about what they need from it. Once you understand the way your customer is interacting with your products or services, you can figure out content ideas that they mostly need.
For example, I developed a PvP video game and we saw a lot of people asking for tutorials and tips about defeating their opponents. They wanted to learn different strategies or techniques, so we set out to create videos and social media content teaching them how to use this specific character well by giving them combo techniques and other tips.
Snoop on the competition
Competitor analysis provides invaluable insight into what works and what doesn’t, as well as enables you to see how you’re performing in comparison to others in the industry.
You can get inspiration for new things to try, for new content to write, and for new ways to steal some traffic. And you can do this without shelling out a lot of money on different tools to monitor competitor data.
- What social media platforms are they using?
- What are their posts that are doing well?
- Is there anything you would do differently?
- Are they posting 100 times a day?
- Are they using any discounts and promotions?
Use keyword research tools
Keyword research helps you in determining which keywords are best to target and provides valuable insight into the queries that your target audience is actually searching on Google.
By using keyword research, you can make sure that there is a market for the topic you want to write about.
The first step in conducting keyword research is to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Just consider the search terms people would use to find what you have to offer.
If you sell coffee and coffee-making equipment, for example, your primary keywords might be:
- coffee
- cappuccino
- French press
- Nespresso, etc.
If you try to search each keyword on google, it will try to autofill your search bar with the information they think is relevant to your query. Pay attention to any relevant suggestions. With the help of this information, you can determine how significant these topics are to your audience and how many different subtopics you might need to cover in your content.
Use online research tools
Here are some free keyword research tools for you if you’re just starting out or are on a tight budget:
- Google Search Console – It shows you your site’s overall search performance in Google
- Ahrefs Webmaster Tools – It provides marketers with a wealth of information including a keyword difficulty score, SERP overviews, and clicks per search.
- Google Keyword Planner – It’s a tool that allows you to research and analyze keywords for your Google Ads campaigns
- Keyword Generator – A free tool for generating keyword ideas.
- Keyword Difficulty Checker – provides a basic keyword suggestion function with volume and keyword difficulty for each suggested keyword
Use your own website
When was the last time you looked through your own website to see if there are any obvious topics you aren’t covering?
Looking for new content ideas starts at home. You’ll be fascinated at how many content ideas you have floating around on your own website.
Look at what questions, keywords or search terms your current customers are searching for on your website. You can observe that people are looking for specific details that are either missing from your website or difficult to find.
Social listening
Social listening implies monitoring the web social media platforms to see what people are saying about your brand.
We won’t be able to connect with our audience if we don’t pay attention to what they want. Social listening enables you to understand what your customers are saying rather than assuming what they want or need.
Go through social data to learn how people react to your content, and find out which topics related to your brand they are discussing on forums like Quora and Reddit.
Social Listening tips:
- Identify & Respond to Pain Points – the best way to figure out your audience’s problems is to hear from them directly. Identify your consumers’ pain points on social, and use sentiment to assess the value
- Find Great User-Generated Content – User-generated content (UGC) refers to social media posts that people from all networks share that are not sponsored or promoted when they are gushing about a good or service. All of these reviews, photos, and posts with brand mentions are the content generated by you as a user. One of the best aspects of user-generated content is how it fosters engagement and strengthens community This is an excellent opportunity for your company to convert customers into brand advocates!
- Use it to improve your customer feedback process – A key reason businesses use social listening is to respond to customer feedback and get a sense of customer feedback, whether negative or positive. Responding to customer questions and concerns and making the effort to fix the problem will make you appear more helpful and increase consumer confidence in your brand.
- Learn from Your Competition – It’s vital to keep an eye on your competitors’ social media activity because you both target the same audience, use the same set of keywords, and share articles on common topics. You can particularly discover a bit of information about what people are saying about your rivals’ products and services and how you can bridge that gap. By doing this, you can develop a marketing plan that is on par with or superior to what they are doing.
Organizing your ideas and brainstorming notes
Chances are your brainstorming session generated a lot of ideas, some of which might be complex or complicated, and perhaps some asides, miscellaneous notes and maybe even a doodle or two. Take the time to organize your notes and break down your ideas into bite-sized chunks of information.
Take a quick look at your ideas.
You might even explore different content topics in the keywords you discover. Many queries today are in the form of questions, and many of them would make excellent blog posts.
Are there any that immediately grab your attention? Are there any ideas that make you stop, think, and reconsider? Ideas should naturally fit into one of three categories: love, like, or so-so.
Decide what type of content you will create
The best way to do this is to think about whether you want to share a story, provide insight or knowledge, or demonstrate a process. What are your goals? Are you looking to get more leads? Drive traffic to your website? Boost sales? Or simply to stay in touch with and be relevant to your audience.
Once you are aware of your goals, you can begin to think about the type of content that will help you achieve them. A blog post, a social media campaign, an email newsletter, or downloadable content could all be used.
For instance, you might want to make an ebook or webinar if you want to get new leads. On the other hand, blog posts and infographics can be a better choice if you’re trying to increase traffic to your website.
Create helpful content
Making your content helpful and asking is the simplest way to ensure that your visitors and audience will share it. Every kind of content that you produce must add value to them and that it fulfil their needs. It is an essential ingredient for ensuring the success of your product with your customers.
There are plenty of contents that are so good they actually “wow” the readers. If it’s that good, they won’t be able to resist bookmarking and sharing it.
There are three ways you can utilize content to engage customers and increase sales.
- Empathize with the needs of your target or ideal audience
- Answer questions, address objections
- Provide unbiased reviews to inform purchase decisions
Before you hit publish after answering “yes, my content is helpful,” dig a little deeper and ask yourself, did my content teach the customer something new? Did my content inform the customer of important news Did my content inspire the customer to do something new? Did my content keep the customer entertained when they had nothing else to do?
Make sure your content is optimized to get organic traffic
Helpful content puts people before search engines. However, this does not imply that you should abandon your SEO best practices. You will still need SEO to increase the likelihood that searchers will find your content.
Follow SEO best practices and include your keywords in the title, meta description, URL, copy, header tags, image file name, and ALT text of your image to help make sure that your content reaches the right users, with the right message, at the right time.
