In one form or another, the entirety of the internet is content. Creating a strategy that works for you is vital because we all know that an engaged audience is more likely to convert to your website. The average internet user has a fairly limited attention span, and they want answers fast.
Creating meaningful content on your site is the key to unlocking the potential of your target audience. Today, we will discuss how you can use audience trend data to create content that your audience will find meaningful.
Why Should Content Be Meaningful?
Many brands struggle to establish a digital presence in the first instance because they fail to recognise the disparity between what they think their target audience wants to know and the information their target audience is actually looking for. This disconnect between brands and audiences is often where existing content strategies fail.
You can take action to increase the chances of success by creating content that elicits an emotional response or has some meaningful connection to the user it is aimed towards. Achieving this type of strategy might sound complex, but we can start by looking at audience behavior.
Understanding Why People Land on Your Site
As a brand, one of the most effective practices you can undertake in understanding your audience is by examining the keywords that bring them on to your site. We will concede at this point that there will be a proportion of site users that will know your brand and frequent your site regularly, but a good content strategy will target new users and those who land on your site from organic search.
By using the organic segment in Google Analytics and filtering by the various pages on your site that carry their own specific product offering, you can gain an insight into the types of queries that bring people to your site. This will give you a set of terms and topic starters you can develop into a content strategy. Other useful SEO tools like Ahrefs and Search Metrics have functionality that can help you with this.
Turning Keywords Into Content Topics
While most of us will have a basic understanding of the keywords that are important to our brands, developing them into broader questions that people use in search engines can give you some starting points on your meaningful content strategy. There are some free resources you can try to help you with this. Answer The Public is one such example that functions by taking data from Google autocorrecting search queries to give you an up-to-date picture of the questions people ask related to your keywords.
Social media also plays an important role in identifying trends and similarities around how users seek information on your brand, offering, and industry. Take some time to look into how your social media performs as well as wider industry news to discover the public conversation around your sector. This stage of research is vital to the foundation of a robust and evolving content strategy.
Beat Your Competitors at Their Own Game
Once you have surfaced the types of searches that are important to your target audience, you can use these to see what currently appears in the organic search space. There might be instances where competitors appear with their own content that satisfies these search queries.
Take note of what they are doing and the content formats that best express the information. Equally, you might also find that no competitors appear in the search space for your target query at all. This might present a valuable content gap opportunity. There are also some tools available on Ahrefs to help you carry out a content gap analysis on your chosen topic.
Think Both Long and Short Term
Content that is timely and satisfies an immediate need for your audience can be effective in gaining traction from search engines. You need to be proactive, which is why organizing a content calendar as part of your workflow can help you on your journey to producing more meaningful ideas for your site. Being in the right place at the right time can serve your audience well.
We should also concede that trends change and audience needs develop. Alongside any ideas that you set for short-lived search trends, try to use the research you have built with the advice we have given in this article to create so-called evergreen content that will be useful to your brand throughout the year.
Depending on your approach, you can create articles or blog posts that are continually updated to become cornerstone content assets that give all the specific information you have identified as important to your target audience.
Weaving in That Meaningful Edge
All throughout the process of creating your content, try to ensure that what you are delivering will be both useful and actionable to the user. A lot of content fails where this principle is lost, and what you’re left with is a collection of brand jargon or irrelevant information.
By taking a step back and looking at the information you are presenting from the perspective of the user, you can cut through to what is really important to their query. This relates back to looking at audience behavior as the starting point of your content topic and ultimately promotes your brand offering in the context of a really useful collection of information. People use search engines to answer questions, and all content should perform this simple function in a meaningful way.
Recognising What Works and Evolve
Once you have created your content based on the research into audience trends and data as described, it’s important you see the benefits at work. Going back to analytics data will show how people engage with the new information you have added to your site and if they land on these pages directly from organic search. You can also look at other metrics like new keyword positions, ranking improvements, and engagements through social media. All of this works to create an ROI on your content strategy.
The advice contained in this article is designed to give you some useful pointers on creating a strategy based on your audience’s needs. No two businesses are the same, so there will be smaller nuances required for your own approach that will be apparent from the research you undertake into your audience’s behavior.