It’s extremely important that companies are relevant to their consumers to ensure that sales are made. Without relevance, your business will only get lost in the competition, and consumers will find no need to choose your business over your closest competition. To maintain relevancy, you need to start by creating relevant content that entices your audience to keep reading more.
Step 1: Create a Buyer Persona
The content you make is intended for a specific target audience; it’s impossible to create content that is relevant to everyone. This is why a buyer persona is necessary to understand who your target audience is before you begin creating content. A buyer persona includes several characteristics that make up your ideal and typical customer. This is comprised of demographic information, employment and industry, education, story, etc. Your buyer persona should encapsulate who your customers are and why they would be interested in your product.
Step 2: Understand the Drive
Before you begin drafting keywords, you need to understand why your users would be interested in your content in the first place. According to Search Engine Land:
“The user intent of a keyword is the goal of the user typing the search query, and it typically falls into three categories: Do something, Know something, or Go somewhere.”
Look back at your buyer persona and think about why a user would come to your website. As you develop the keywords you will use in your content, remember to think about your users and the drives they have for engaging with your company.
Step 3: Develop a Keyword List
Keywords are what your users search for on search engines such as Google or Yahoo to discover what they’re looking for. When creating your content, it’s important to keep SEO in mind. It doesn’t have to consume your content, and you don’t have to utilize too many keywords that it’s very obvious in your writing. However, you should be mindful of what your users are looking for so that your content comes up at the top of their search results. To begin drafting your list of keywords, think of your business and everything that’s relevant to it – what words would you use to describe your product? Then think about your consumer – what problems are he or she facing that you can solve? Be specific when creating your keyword list so your content doesn’t get lost in the saturation surrounding broad keywords.
Step 4: Insert Keywords Where Necessary
Keywords should be placed in ideal spots throughout your content to get the most optimization. These places are: Page Title, Header, Content, Image Alt Tags. Using keywords in these places will guarantee that your audience finds your content when they search using those keywords. This all ties back to relevance – by placing keywords in your content, you’re guaranteeing that your audience will find you. Because you understand the drive for users utilizing those specific keywords, your content will come up higher in search engine results. Also make sure to create enticing meta descriptions for your content and to include your keywords in them! These are little previews of your content, so you want to be sure that it’s appealing to users.
Generating relevant content is a systematic process that requires strategy and attention to detail. Of course, being a great writer is essential to the success of your content marketing strategy. However, so is having a strong foundation and backbone for each piece of content that you produce.