SEO is about capturing people searching for something and getting them to go onto your website. If you know what people are searching for then you can adapt the information you have on our website to fit them perfectly. You can make them want to buy what they were looking for and help them ‘solve a problem’. It’s not quite that easy though: we don’t know what people will be searching for exactly. So is it a guessing game? Not really. You just need to make sure you are an authority on your topic, so that you can capture people looking for something relating to your topic. Let me explain.
Jono Alderson from Linkdex spoke at the SearchLove conference in London about how SEO is a marketing tool that can be used to capture people higher up the conversion funnel. What that means is that by using content marketing to rank on the first page of Google for queries to do with the topic of your brand or products you can capture people earlier in their decision making process.
He spoke of an example where his TV started making a strange noise and he Googled “TV making strange noise”. This query implies that he’s got a potentially broken TV, which could mean that he’ll be looking for a new TV soon. What he found in the search result was not a bunch of search results from TV companies, but from content/review/blog sites where people talk about how to fix the potential issue with the strange noise. In this moment, Jono probably isn’t ready to make a purchase but if a company selling TVs provided him with a very useful article at the top of the search results on how to fix the problem then he might remember them and go back in the future when his TV eventually breaks.
This is a massively underused opportunity for brands, not just for SEO but for establishing a strong online presence as an authority on the industry. You want to make people go to your site and say “I’m so glad I found this content!” The aim is to help your customers do something better than before they found your content. Sounds easy enough, but how do you do this?
Becoming an expert on your topic shouldn’t be too hard as you already know a lot about your product/brand the hard bit is how to make it the best on the web. First step is to come up with some useful information that you think could be really helpful for your potential customers. Then Google those titles. Next step is to use the results you find and create something better than that and then implement it on your site. Keep this process going and you’ll soon have topic authority which will enable you to steal market share from competitors.
A strong on-page blog strategy is essential to e-commerce sites as well as for B2B sites if you are trying to capture people higher up the conversion funnel. Your blog is the perfect place to direct people to for helpful and inspiring content. So keep thinking about moments your customers might experience and keep creating content for that moment.
If you need help creating a content marketing strategy like this or executing one then get in touch today and find out how we can help!