How To Develop Content for the Customer

Ten years ago, SEO Content was a blasphemous word, it was all about keywords and keyword density ruled the ranking page content.

Today, Google has completely reshuffled the deck and quality content is the king. Search engine optimisation has completely evolved into search experience optimisation, which benefits everyone. Spam techniques wont work anymore.

Vikas Rana, Snr SEO Consultant at WebsiteFix believes content strategy is necessary for the success and management of your website.

“Identifying gaps, and monitoring gaps is a big deal, and something an SEO specialist can deal with. Their job is to make your website the best it can be”, he says.

SEO today must be about user experience. Search experience optimisation is focused purely on enhancing the customer journey. These days, the search query is often the starting point of that journey. Unfortunately, sometimes we do not know the exact phrase or keyword the customer typed in that started their journey, but we do know the exact page they landed on when they reached your website.

Based on data from Google, we can make an educated guess what keywords and phrases lead the customer to the webpage they arrived on. We can then use this data to build an inventory of keywords and phrases, each of which may dictate a completely different set of user intent and information.

Identifying gaps in the customer experience

The identified keywords and phrases serve as inventory of customer intents, and this allows us to perform an audit of the gaps in customer experience. What experiences may the customer be looking for that your website is lacking? We have mapped the various intents to each stage of the customer journey, then performed a gap analysis. The gap defines the work that must be done to create valuable content and optimise your website content for the entire journey.

Common gaps:

1.  A path is broken, and the user is prevented from taking the next step in their journey

Could be a navigational issue, but it could also be that a customer has travelled too far down the rabbit hole and you need to bring them back a few steps to where they need to be.

2.  Customer has a question, and you failed to answer it

I want this product, but in this colour, do you have it? How much for this product? Where can I find product Y? Regardless of the question, if you do not answer it to the customer’s satisfaction they cannot continue and therefore are at an impasse. This means they will return to the search engine and go somewhere else.

3.  No stock

This means working alongside your merchandising partners to determine what needs to be restocked and ordered to keep up with demand in order to satisfy customer demand and need.

The common gaps vary site by site and the define intent. Each page and set of intents require a dedicated content plan.