At this point, we all know we need content for our websites to be successful. However, exactly what that content is can often be unclear. As we’ve heard many times, creating content for the sake of creating content is just a bad strategy and a waste of time.
So how do we figure out what content we actually need? The answer isn’t simple, but in order to create content your audience wants (and can find in search results), there are a few places we must look.
1. Analyze Search Results
You may have a great idea for content, but do you know if it’s been done before? Do you know if people are actually looking for that type of content? Do you know how they’d be looking for that content?
This may seem obvious, but one way to get a better picture of your content needs is to take a look at the search results themselves.
By searching potential titles, keyword phrases and content topics, you can begin to understand what’s out there, what’s being asked and most importantly, search intent for your target keywords.
Let’s take, for example, Client A. Client A offers healthcare analytics software:
Looking at the search results for the term “healthcare analytics,” we see mostly top-of-the-funnel content, including blog posts and healthcare-related articles. There are no product or solutions pages listed, letting us know that if we want to reach users searching for this term, we have to give them more information-based content.
When crafting the content strategy for this phrase (and this buyer), search results are something we must take into consideration. Does the client already have a blog post about this or an informational page we can use? If not, we likely need to build something… and that something needs to be better than what’s already out there.
Just because you have a content idea you like doesn’t mean it’s something your buyers will like. Your favorite content idea may also perform poorly in the search results.
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