Content marketers can no longer just depend on historical SEO performance data as a predictor of future success due to the change in consumer behaviour and the enormous volume of content being produced.
The goal of Google hasn’t changed; it’s still to deliver the best response possible for every search. Its capacity to offer the optimum solution has evolved, though, and it can now do so more frequently.
It’s critical to gain as much knowledge as you can about how search is related to your business, target audience, and other factors given that 71% of marketers think organic search plays a role in their business intelligence. Seven areas are listed here.
1.Market information
83% of marketers claim to undertake market research, and 88% of that group claim to utilise that research to guide business choices, according to HubSpot’s Not Another State of Marketing Report 2021. 67% of marketers polled said they intended to increase their expenditure on market research in the upcoming year.
By thoroughly understanding your market, you can more accurately determine the ranking and traffic potential of content assets. Here, keyword research is a crucial granular activity because it reveals the terms and expressions that buyers use to find information, goods, and services similar to yours.
You should also be familiar with the websites that show up first in the search results for those keywords. It might not be a typical business rival. The best information, for instance, can come from a big media outlet, a university, or a government organisation that produces pertinent content on your subject.
By watching your rank and evaluating market information, you can find opportunities to optimise content for more precise intents, longer-tail keywords, and less competitive SERPs.
2.Searcher purpose
You can give material that your target audience will want to read by understanding why they search.
Connect your current content to the path of your clients. View the coverage gaps you have. Perhaps you’re doing a wonderful job of creating awareness and educational material for the top of the funnel, but you’re lacking content to address searches with a commercial or transactional intent.
You may assess the search terms users use to locate your content. You can make sure that content continues to offer the best and most complete answers when you have a solid understanding of the motivations behind the queries you’re aiming to address.
Finally, you can dig even further and examine the micro-moments, or the person’s state of mind at the time of the search. Google published a number of white papers in 2015 that focused on the know, go, do, and buy micro-moments of search behaviour.
Micro-moment strategies are still highly significant in 2021. Using a micro-moment lens to analyse SERP results can help you better match your content marketing strategy and customer journeys by:
- Recognizing appropriate uses for movies, graphics, and quick-read information
- recognising the variations in the target markets and keywords at each micro-moment
- improving and speeding up the alignment of keywords to their client journey
- figuring out how paid content tactics can support SEO for a variety of micro-moments in order to dominate specific keywords and categories
This will assist you in setting priorities for content expenditure nearer conversions.
3.Types of search
How does the content’s intended audience find it? This can significantly alter the format and even the content that should be included.
For instance, you should consider offering a top-notch mobile page experience if you discover that 85% of your blog audience accesses your content via a mobile device. Rank-influencing features, including page speed, external links, technological components, and on-page elements, have different effects depending on the industry:
4.SERP placement
The appearance of search engine result pages varies depending on the query. Rich snippets, video and image results, map packs, people-also-ask questions and answers, and a host of other features are now available in addition to the standard results with the title, search snippet, and link.
Understanding the kinds of results that show up on the SERP for the queries you’re focusing on is crucial. For instance, if an older, less authoritative highlighted snippet from a listicle-style piece appears on the results page, your company may have a great chance to build and optimise a better listicle article specifically for the topic. You could even make and optimise a video to gain placement in those rich results that display in that valuable real estate above the fold if you decide to explore a topic where a video appears on the SERP.
As I demonstrate below for health care, education, home renovation, banking, travel, and e-commerce, you can frequently learn from trends in your business. For instance, a subset of searchers who value speedy responses is visible in the health care and education industries, but this type of information doesn’t even register as a preference in the home improvement, finance, or e-commerce industries.
5.Types of content
The best content formats and distribution channels for the audiences and keywords you’re targeting can be determined with the aid of SEO insights.
For instance, a searcher who clicks on a link to a detailed B2B buyer’s guide may anticipate an ebook rather than a blog article. A searcher looking for a broad overview would probably anticipate a high-level blog post on the subject rather than a restricted download.
Additionally, you might find that the initial content type isn’t a suitable fit for drawing searchers. For instance, according to your market and keyword analysis, the guide that was published last month ought to be doing far better than it is. However, it appears from your search results that it isn’t performing as planned. You repackage it into other content assets, such as a YouTube video, a SlideShare presentation, or a collection of blog posts, to increase its audience.
To determine which content formats resonate and perform best for meeting various user needs, analyse your website analytics and industry trend statistics. Make sure each piece of old content is performing to its full potential and use these SEO insights to inform future material.
6.Automated real-time user behaviour
This tip becomes a little more challenging because you can’t always adapt your content to what visitors are doing in real-time on your website. However, according to studies from Segment, Accenture, and other organisations, consumers become irritated by impersonal material, and the majority of them are more willing to patronise companies that offer them personalised offers and suggestions.
To achieve this at scale, AI-enabled SEO technology can be a big help. Since they have already left by the time you analyse the site analytics and determine exactly what that visitor was looking for,
We collaborated with Campbell’s, whose recipe material is a crucial factor in promoting and selling their products. Their website automatically generated appropriate internal links for the footer and labelled them as “members also viewed…” across all recipe pages using a tool provided by our company. Within a few weeks, Campbell’s content for 4,000 keywords moved to page one.
7.Conversion and engagement insights
It is crucial to know which key performance indicators (KPIs) to use to determine whether a piece of content is effective. For instance, traffic statistics and ranking data are wonderful, but are users engaging with your material or are they just browsing?
In Google Analytics, set up conversion monitoring to monitor if visitors are completing your desired goal.
If you want to see which material gets the most engagement on your social media networks, you can also check them out. Can you have the same success in search by focusing on a different goal or subject?
Putting everything together
There is no end to good outcomes in SEO; it is a continuous effort. Your SEO content strategy must keep up with changing consumer trends, from mobile optimization to focused keywords and from searcher intent to content kinds.
Are you utilising SEO to its fullest potential? Plan for 2022 but also be ready to dig deeper. Find opportunities to scale your efforts with clever automation, improve the specificity of your personalisation, and streamline content optimization.