Why YouTube For Lead Generation Doesn’t Need Costly Production
Success on YouTube for lead generation is often perceived as the domain of big brands with even bigger budgets. Expensive equipment, large production teams, and...
When it comes to SEO campaigns, customer and target audience insights for your SEO strategy is the place I usually start. If you want conversions, which is usually the objective of driving organic visits to a website, then you need to get an understanding of your customers, what makes them tick and how you can use this to shape your organic search campaigns.
Here’s a look at three ways to get insights from your target audience and how to use them when putting an SEO strategy together.
Customer Service and Sales Teams – the front line for customer queries
Customer service teams hear it all! They can tell you the most frequently asked questions, the things your existing customers complain about the most, they’re often on the receiving end of feedback about your website’s usability, how easy it is, or isn’t, to find the information they’re looking for.
Your sales team are also a great resource for tapping into prospective customers.
How you collate all this qualitative customer feedback will depend on the size of your organisation, and some companies will have systems in place to record all of this information and put it into a format usable by marketing teams.
In the absence of a formal system for aggregating customer feedback, the next best thing you can do is go and talk to your customer service and sales teams! In fact, even if you do have a system which records all the feedback, I’d recommend you speak to the customer service and sales team anyway to get the full story, warts and all!
Use this customer feedback when planning your SEO content ideas, and expand on the keyword research around the most frequently asked questions, the chances are, if people are ringing up your company to ask these questions, there could be lots more people who are asking Google instead.
Google Auto-Suggest
I’m a huge fan of Google Auto Suggest (also known as Google Autocomplete) for conducting keyword research and the sometimes surprising suggestions can offer a different point of view. It’s also a good way to bridge a gap in audience insights for your SEO from areas that are missed by your customer service and sales teams.
There are a number of search keyword tools that will give you the Google Autocomplete data, without you having to manually search. Here at Six Search we currently use Ahrefs.
So you have all your autocomplete/autosuggest data, where do you start deciding how to incorporate these into your SEO campaigns?
The most obvious way to act on this data is to create some content on your site which addresses these search queries. Here’s how I usually approach such a task – first, prioritise the list of autocomplete keywords by relevance so you can get working on the most important first. Then check which keywords can easily fit into existing sections/areas of your website. Create these first as if you have existing top-level pages which are ranking it will help your new content get picked up quicker compared to creating completely new page sections from scratch.
Keep an Eye on Your Competitors
Competitor analysis should be a part of your marketing activities regardless of your specialism. When it comes to conducting competitor research around customer insights for SEO, you’ll have to dig a little deeper into the site, look through their resources sections, and their blog posts to find out who they’re targeting and what keywords their content is optimised for.
It is also worth looking beyond the content on their website – browse their social media channels and independent review websites to see what their customers are saying, what they’re asking and how your competitors are responding.
If you find any new content areas you want to target with your own SEO campaigns, you could very easily write your own version of the same, but to really get a win from your competitor analysis, find out how you can make your version better, more customer friendly, and more search engine friendly.
These are just three ways to use audience insights for your SEO strategy. Depending on the sector you operate in and whether your target is a B2C audience or a B2B audience, there are lots of other areas you can explore for ideas.
Check out our tips for nailing your next seasonal SEO campaign.