All too often I see content strategies that:
- Look at what people are searching for (keyword research).
- Create landing pages for as many keywords as possible.
- Write gobs of (often meaningless) keyword-optimized content.
This is a typical old-school SEO strategy, but what about audience (visitor) intent?
There's a lot of focus in SEO around optimized landing pages (as there should be). An optimized landing page has a targeted topic and keywords, a targeted page title, a clean URL, a compelling meta description, intuitive layout and navigation, loads quickly, looks amazing, and has calls to action most likely above the fold.
Content, on the other hand, is more than just optimized landing pages. Content serves a purpose. Content can give a company an advantage over it's competitors. Content is a
means of communicating and building a relationship with an audience.
What is audience intent?
That core audience you're trying to attract needs something. Maybe they're researching the best hiking vacations around the globe. Maybe they want to know where they could go hiking specifically in Utah. Maybe they know they want to go hiking in Utah and are looking for Utah vacation packages that include hiking. Or maybe they just need to book a trip from Boston to Park City. Their intent can be very vague or very specific, and when coming up with content for a landing page you need to put yourself in the mind of your audience and consider what it is that they really want to see. The audience intent would consider:
- What kind of content would help to easily and satisfactorily meet the intent of that visitor?
- If the intent is vague (ex: "hairstyles"), what are the various types of intents that they may have? Ex: hairstyle how-to videos, hairstyle lookbooks, short hairstyles, long hairstyles, hairstyles for curly hair, thin hair, frizzy hair, specific hairstyles like up-do's, braids, etc.
- What would they consider useful?
- What would they consider interesting or engaging?
- What would they consider sharable?
The basic requirements of content strategy
A great piece of content requires all of the things a great landing page does (when the content is indeed a landing page, as opposed to other types of content like white papers, videos, guides, maps, etc.). A great content strategy, though, considers a bit more beforehand, primarily:
- What are the goals of this content (why are we creating it)?
- What are the goals for the business (how do we make money)?
- What does it need to solve for the consumer (what is the audience intent)?
And after thoughtful research around the audience needs and competitive landscape, it addresses this question:
How do we build something that meets (and exceeds) user intent, while satisfying our business goals, and is better than anything else out there?
Let's look at these considerations in real-life examples of content strategies. These examples clearly differentiate between simply building landing pages and writing copy vs. coming up with creative ways to meet audience intentions and business goals.
Content strategy example 1:
Content vs. lifestyle
The company in this scenario is currently purely transactional.
The setup (in brief):
- Audience: Women age 25-55, typically moms.
- The audience need/intent: Discover smart and innovative ways to be awesome and live fabulously while being budget-conscious.
- Content goals: Extend the currently purely transactional brand into a lifestyle brand through an extensive, multidimensional content plan.
- Business goals: Sell product online.
Previous attempts at content by the company have fallen flat (as have similar attempts by their primary competitors). No one reads their blogs and hasty attempts at launching content pieces have been more or less crickets.
Much of this has to do with a transactional company trying to have a voice when no one is expecting them to talk. A brand without a clear voice and no authoritative experts or influencers, launching random bits of content is not a likely win situation. From an audience standpoint it raises more questions than advocacy - Why is this content here? Will there be more? Why should I consider them the authoritative voice in (topic), especially when there are many more authoritative voices out there dedicating entire websites and lifestyles to these topics?
Lifestyles in this case is the key. Producing content is very different than immersing your brand in a lifestyle:
| CONTENT | LIFESTYLE |
| Landing pages | Self-expression |
| Articles | Community |
| Blog Posts | Culture |
| Videos | Identity |
| Slideshows | Associations |
| Guides | Experience |
| Maps | Emotion |
Consider these brands embracing lifestyles through content. They're all there to sell product, but their content attracts and engages audiences, draws them in like moths to flames. Their content isn't based on keywords and optimized landing pages, it's based on giving their audiences what they need and getting them excited about it in the process.
| GoPro: Be inventive, buy cameras. | Nike: Do sports, buy shoes. |
|
|
| Airbnb: Travel hip, rent places. | Martha Stewart: Be crafty, buy products. |
|
|
The approach proposed for this particular client in this example:
- Client: Live fabulously on a budget, buy products.
See how that's different from this?
- Client: Optimized landing pages derived from high-volume keywords, buy products.
The content strategy involves weekly collections, guides, a magazine-style approach to daily content, evergreen marketing pieces and special approaches to holidays, plus acquisitions and partnerships with influential people in the space and potentially a branded "voice of the company" personality doing TV appearances and PR and promoting the content.
Of course this content strategy took several months and a lot of research. In a future post I'll go into detail on the process and tools available for putting together a comprehensive content strategy.
Content strategy example 2:
Articles vs. awesome content
This client was an online magazine targeted at women, with several top-level categories on the site like fashion, beauty, etc. presented in one of two formats: slideshows or articles.
The setup:
- Audience: Primarily women, primary age group: 35-55.
- The audience need/intent: Get fashion and beauty inspiration, tips, ideas.
- Content goals: Reach and engage more women.
- Business goals: Page views (ad impressions).
The easy part of this content strategy was the architecture. The current architecture was so basic that keyword research alone was enough to provide some great insight into what the audience was looking for that the online magazine was providing but in no clear architectural way. There were quick wins to be had like creating subcategorical landing pages like Spring Trends and Summer Trends under Fashion Trends.
The bigger challenge: The competition. Women's fashion and beauty is a highly competitive space online. Creating landing pages does not mean they will come. This content needed a more creative "how can we do something better" eye. From the typical SEO mindset you can think of it as "how can we create something that people will link to, share and engage with more than our competitors?"
We utilized several research avenues, primarily:
- Market research on online beauty and fashion trends.
- Extensive competitive research.
- Extensive research into trends on what's popular in beauty and fashion online and in social networks.
And we found all kinds of cool things that the online magazine could be doing to attract and engage more women. In the end the content strategy proposed features like:
- Videos or slideshows comparing different makeup brands (example: different thick lash mascaras or long-lasting lipsticks).
- Makeover tools.
- Various types of "lookbooks" for things like pixie hairstyles, colorful eyeliner ideas, nail trends, etc.
- Working with brand partners to deliver samples boxes to subscribers.
- A series on recreating celebrity looks for less (and where to buy).
- Local fashionista bloggers in major cities who blog on where the latest coolest fashion finds, fashion events and fashionable places to be are in that city.
- Weekly collections/series around various topics like This Weeks Cutest Shoes (in your inbox), Must-Have Dresses, Craziest Fashion Trends, etc.
This was presented within the newly proposed architecture with cross-linking opportunities and optimization recommendations (especially around video, images and social sharing) for a complete content strategy.
Content strategy example 3:
Selling vacation packages
An airline sells vacation packages that include flights and tours of the area they mainly fly into. They have the packages on the site but they're performing pretty poorly.
The setup:
- Audience: Adult international travelers coming from the United States.
- The audience need/intent: Find things to do in the area, find tours in the area, find vacation packages, plan a vacation in the area.
- Content goals: Attract, engage and convert more people.
- Business goals: Primary: sell flights. Secondary: sell packages.
Here are the things I looked at in preparation for their content strategy:
- What do searches tell us about the various types of intent the searchers have? People may be searching a specific attraction or they may be looking for hiking tours. We found at least 4 high-level ways to slice and dice intent (in addition to looking for packages): By specific attraction name, by town, by type of attraction (ex: waterfalls), or by activity (ex: bird-watching).
- Does the site architecture currently meet those intents? In fact, no. The architecture was somewhat random. It is difficult to find some of the things on the site based on those 4 types of intent. Some of the content that could be easily cross-sold was also buried as landing pages in the packages section.
- How do visitors with these intents navigate the site now? We did user testing asking visitors to find and book a specific attraction and to find and book a specific activity. Many were unable to complete the tasks, and all of them went about it in completely different ways. We learned a lot about what people expect to find and how they expect to find it that could help guide our content strategy (including additional types of intent like time of year the package is available for instance).
- What content assets do we have to work with? A content inventory was done with a sample size of content currently in season and live on the site, and content out of season that they currently remove from the site. Each page was "tagged" with the specific attractions, towns, type of "thing to see," and activities that were included in the package along with package price, travel period, whether or not it includes a flight, departure airport, number of nights.
With all of this in mind, the end content strategy proposed things like:
- Architecture: An updated architecture with landing pages to meet the specific major intents.
- Navigation: A newly proposed navigation (which is slightly different from the architecture).
- URLs: Of course.
- Tools: A proposed filtering tool/system to filter anything from type of activity involved to price range to number of nights and everything in-between.
- On-Page: On-page content recommendations based on what we learned from user testing + adding in related content for higher engagement and search-friendly cross-linking of relevant content and pulling things like transportation options out from being a buried landing page under packages to being a module cross-linked from relevant package pages.
- Seasonal content treatments: Adding the ability to book packages that aren't in season right now + how to address long term landing pages for seasonally available or annually changing content.
Rather than just creating landing pages and optimizing them based on what people are searching for, we took an approach to this content based on the various types of user intents people may have that may bring them to the site and ultimately book a package.
Remember, we're creating content for people, not search engines
It all goes hand-in-hand. When you create something that your audiences like, that they link to more, share more, and engage with more, it's likely to affect search engine rankings and traffic, too. Of course this isn't your good ol' typical "SEO," but its also not 1999. The best SEO is—and for many years has been—a good product, so taking the time to consider your audience intentions when creating a content strategy can pay off in more ways than one.
Laura,
I like how you started the post by pointing out the typical 'old-school' content creation process. I think we've all been guilty of that at some point.
During the keyword research phase, a lot of people often look at the most searched terms and automatically think, "we've got to optimize for these." What interests me more are the queries that ask questions. My philosophy, which I believe resonates with this post, is that if you can answer those types of queries you will be in a better place than if you simply over-optimize for the most searched terms, the old-school way.
68 Mostly Free Ways to Entertain Yourself at Home and 121 Things to Do Instead of Spending Money - the fact that these articles have so many shares is a sad commentary on our society's constant need for stimulation. I guarantee many more people would benefit from reading the article about tackling $40,000 worth of debt than those goofy feel-good articles.
Exactly what I was thinking, especially since the photo on the "68 Mostly Free Ways to Entertain Yourself..." article has a picture of a woman painting her nails. Is that really a form of entertainment? Is this really the type of content people want to read? Sad indeed.
I felt the same way, to be honest, and that's something I've thought a lot about as a content manager. There's a balance to be struck between what people want (mostly mindless entertainment) and what people need (things that will actually help them level up and become better versions of themselves). The difficult comes from the fact that people don't want to admit that all they're looking for is mindless entertainment. Our jobs as marketers frequently involve finding ways to use a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, while at the same time being careful not to treat the audience like they're children that don't like or can't handle the medicine in the first place.
I see this as one of our greatest challenges in today's marketing -- we're making products and offering services that people need. How do we align that with what people want without sacrificing our dignity? How can we disguise what people need as something they want without lying to them?
"How do we align that with what people want without sacrificing our dignity?"
Very salient regarding the IM community and a lot of the Guru materials out there...
Yeah that was probably not the best image... I originally used it as a talking point in a PPT to editorial teams who don't typically write article-style content. I think it's from PopSugar? Or one of those Sugar sites. :)
Certainly not a knock on the image, Laura -- I think David and Norton (and myself) all meant that the image was a sobering reminder of a greater issue we all need to deal with. I used to deal with the same thing in journalism -- where to draw the line between entertainment value and newsworthiness. I'm starting to think there's a blog post waiting to be written in here somewhere... =)
Very nicely written. Specifically for those who are actually making sites for search engines and not for visitors. I found almost same points that all good web strategist are explaining by the end of 2011. However, here the examples part made this post really interesting and more understandable.
Excellent post. Most of the examples you use are product examples - GoPro, Martha Stewart, etc. In the future, can you use some examples that focus on services. I'm in a professional services industry, and some examples along those lines would be helpful.
Great question. Off the top of my head I dont know a lifestyle brand that is service-oriented, but I'd love to find one...
Hey Laura,
Thanks for the article. I enjoyed the examples that you included.
One question I have is this: What is the roll of keywords and keyphrase research? Does one use this research to understand topics, themes, and language, and then provide resources, tools, and strategies around these themes? This is something that I have found to be challenging in e-commerce. It is easy to provide customers value with a buying intention, but it is challenging (not impossible) to meet customers in different stages. It can be overwhelming if one begins to look beyond categories and subcategories, but into the meaty content that is less competitive, and more specific.
Do you have strategies for choosing specific themes to develop, or do you focus on broad themes first?
Thanks again for the great article.
Hi Evan -
Keyword research is one way of getting insight into your audience needs. Our shows us what people are looking for via that channel (search). Typically you'd also want to supplement that with other types of research, depending on what would give you the most insight for the type of content you're working with. You could use Usertesting.com to have outsole run through your or your competitors sites (and theTypes of tasks you set up here and type of questions you ask can make all the difference in what you get out of it), you can do focus groups, use site feedback (something like uservoice), surveys, analytics flow data, and market research from places like Think with Google, Search Google Scholar, or use more traditional market research. That's all going to be in my next post :)
Basically you want to use whatever avenues you can to learn what people like, don't like, want more ore less of from your site or brand, your competitor's site or brand and/or the industry as a whole.
Hope that's helpful for now?
Hey Laura,
Thanks for expanding on that for me. That was helpful, and I look forward to your next post :) Cheers!
My eyes were completely opened when I saw actual bookings/sales coming from not "head" keyword terms with high volume searches, but the long tail queries that you couldn't specifically plan on. Many people have already talked all about long tail keywords being the highest converting before, but this goes to show that there are keywords not in the keyword planner that people are searching for, so you can't limit yourself just to what you see in the keyword planner. So I now know that keyword research is just part of the puzzle, not the only answer. Great post!
I really like Laura's response to this question. Keyword research should be thought of one way to understand 'real' behavioral segmentation of an audience.
Evan - When you use the word 'competitive', I'm going to assume this is judged through the lens of Google or Moz, in how they judge competition in relation to commercial intent. Google's keyword data and that competition information should always be reviewed with a lens for "Is this a lagging indicator of customer preference for a product / service" Look at the market, understand competitors, business models, etc. and understand if the market is truly evolved fully. You may have some amazing keywords with no posted 'volume', that are reflecting the trends of the market populace and their understanding of what they should be looking for.
In certain B2C spaces, where the consumer purchase is a purchase around identity, a good customized to preference, or has a true emotional driver - the consumer preference and buying criteria can be shaped by active communities. Example, nerd time:
There is this incredible sub culture for creating Custom Transformers. Yup, the old 80's Transformers. 3rd parties are taking the old characters I loved as a kid, and making new, high end toys that reflect how I always pictured these characters. There is a consumer instigated demand for this product (no awareness or education needed for the stimulus), that has ties rooted in emotions from my childhood (read - greater flexibility for commanding a greater price). When I started to look at my purchase, I was thinking the basics - price, perceiving quality, trust of vendor.
When immersing in a community about this type of product, the community is driving development of these toys in an unexpected way. Now I am looking at overall die cast parts in the product, tolerances on ball joints, and quality / accurate of head sculpt. NONE of those keywords use 'Transformers' in them, or fit the traditional definition of 'long tail' queries. However, if I had a thorough guide educating me on how to evaluate 'head sculpt quality'....wow, what an opportunity to imprint on the brand that provided me with that valuable information.
So, long answer to what I'm saying...
Create a visual map of your consumer. Use the data available to you - demo, psycho, behav. segmentation, user interaction, traditional market research. Keyword research is just one tool to make this map. Consider the economics of your market space, and understand what role you play in driving demand / awareness.
Great read !
I'm sure now that a content strategy should definitely go through targeting a specific audience. Content relevance and uniqueness contribute to have seen. Good content always more likely to be shared.
Thank you for the insightful examples of assessing a client's current situation and developing a solid plan from the base up. Developing a content strategy based on audience intent first and keywords second is an excellent way to facilitate keyword discovery. You end up discovering what is actually interesting to your client's target demographic, which as much as it sounds like a no brainer, can be a difficult concept for some businesses to grasp.
This post was reminiscent of Michael King's write up on buyer personas https://moz.com/blog/personas-understanding-the-per... which is another great way to think about user based content strategy.
I was especially interested in your 3rd example, where a content inventory was necessary to understand what assets currently existed and how to re-organize the architecture it was housed in to be more user friendly. On my computer the image of the spreadsheet used is unreadable when downloaded and zoomed in... Could you possibly upload an example template of what your content inventory looks like as a shared Google spreadsheet?
Thanks again for the excellent post. Bookmarked and will be sharing to colleagues and prospects.
Hi Nicholas! I had to make that image indiscernible in order to not publicly share the specific content strategy work I'm doing for a client right now - apologies for that. I can tell you though that it just started as a blank spreadsheet I and took all of the offerings for that part of the site I was working with (each offering is a page) and added attributes to each one in order to filter them or find them in different ways. The offerings/pages are currently all in one section but really people could be looking for that content several different ways (by the name of a city, by the activity they want to do, by the price, by the time of year it's available, etc) so each column assigns those attributes to an offering. There's also content strategy worksheets and tools - check out this *unbelievable* post from Jon Coleman on content strategy resources:
https://www.jonathoncolman.org/2013/02/04/content-s...
I reference it often. Hope it's helpful :)
Woo! Helpful would be an understatement. It looks like you just laid out my next year of reading.
Thanks for the clarification on the spreadsheet. I really like that concept, seems like an efficient way to understand how your assets should be categorized to meet the correct intents. If I understand you correctly, you would identify that Asset A meets Intents A & B and would be labeled as such, then Asset B might be labeled as fulfilling intents B & C, so both Assets A & B should be categorized and find-able when intent B leads a user to the site?
That's right! Assigning attributes to each asset so the assets could be found via filtering (for example, you might find a car on a used car site by price, by color, by brand, etc - the different attributes) rather than just having a list of carts in the car section. Additionally, many of those attributes also make sense as landing pages (like Hondas).
Laura you have researched in a brilliant way. I really liked how you have given some examples specially with the age factors or visitors. I hope that this research will help us a lot.
Great work !!! here you have targeted your content strategy towards lifestyle and women, every content has its unique audience with lot importance. Now For Example targeted user is a user which seeks and search's for "Technology" for example "Drupal web development" is my targeted keyword what my user or targeted user are going to search for that " drupal 7 features" "drupal 8 vs drupal 7" more results we can get from analytics keyword planner. So, My Content Strategy should be to predict what is next people going to search - Drupal 8 is latest - Post your content for "Drupal 8 vs Drupal 7" or "features of Drupal 8" or " Benefits Of Drupal 8 Over Drupal 7 Web Development " <- is a infographics targeted to drupal user.
Here I am giving example of Drupal for moment make similar strategy for tech or product wise
FYI, all links in comments are nofollowed.
Wonderfully well written article Laura. It is always important to be reminded that we are writing content for people...not search engines.
Well said. I think the last paragraph really sums things up nicely. Saying this, though, I've come across a lot of sites that are still ranking extremely well (even in quite competitive keyword segments) despite having rather horrendous "keyword-onslaughts" in their copy... I think Google has room to become ever more brutal in reference to such offences! The sheer volume of "SEO experts" that commit to offering clients a comprehensive SEO service, yet can't write strong and engaging copy, is something that really pains me, too. We are picking up a lot of business at the moment for pure, straight-up digital copywriting services, and the majority is coming from clients that outsourced to budget SEO agencies who, in turn, flooded their site/s with absent-minded spiels, offering little to users... and even less to search engines!
hi ,
I want to know the exact strategy for finding keywords..
the step where I am stuck
step 1 I found the competitor keywords using ispoinage tool
step 2 there are huge amount of keywords my competitor using
step 3 how do i select the keyword or group them ...???
[email protected]
thanks
I have a strong feeling that Google will change Broder and Charikar soon. And that will turn content-marketing to the general marketing. As it should be in the ideal world.
Great read!
You have just explained the message well.
As for my own opinion, you’ll not surely win the battle if your content strategy is just only focuses on the keywords. It is important to consider your audience, and I hope marketers always keep this on their mind.
Just like what the concluding thought said, “You are creating content for people, not for search engines...” You have said it right, Laura!
Nice share! :)
Excellent article Laura. I teach similar concepts in our content marketing workshops. Basically I show some basic steps to figure out what prospects and customers are searching for which also helps determine intent. People so rarely search with one or two keywords anymore, which is what I see so many people still focused on with their content. Those days are long gone. Like you said, we're creating content for people, not search engines.
Clearly, content marketing strategy execution is a combination of content development, program execution (lead gen, nurturing, sales qualification), and web/digital design and dev. You're going to need a mix of all those things over the course of a 12 month cycle. Well, thats makes up a lot of monthly / yearly expenditure.
It is a very common to see people talking about content being the master of the SEO efforts. It is refreshing to see someone going deep into the details of 'How exactly should one plan for the content'. This article has some great points that should be kept in mind while planning the content for the landing pages and websites.
Thanks!
Laura, you have written really fascinating article over content strategy I know your research in that topic gave you tough time but you have really well. Above all this your website design must be perfect but I really appreciate how you have given examples which is not easy. Let me ask you one question as you written " Audience: Primarily women, primary age group: 35-55." I am really confuse about it how would recognized the age group ?
[link removed]
A content strategy should be about serving the audience with great unique content, which is able to earn links and provide targeted traffic to a website. Foccusing on keywords is not effective. I would focus on topics which match with the interests of a certain community. That is the best way to gain reputation and authority.
The content inventory spreadsheet looks interesting - do you have any resources to share?