Creating SEO Content: Think Like Your Customers When Creating Online Content
So you’ve been up all night working on a new web page, blog post, article or (“insert your online content here”).
Your post flows, sounds great and you love that you’ve named your new product something absolutely unique and wonderful.
Here’s the question: Did you check online to see how people are searching for this new product and the phrases they’re using?
If not, you may fail to capture search traffic for your article.
As marketers, we’ve traditionally named our products and services and then marketed the names to customers.
Using a unique, fancy or very “out there” name just didn’t matter because we knew we could convince people to use the name and come asking for it.
However, the world changed when search engines became such a large part of our everyday lives.
Today, the people who search drive the words we use to describe our products and services.
Marketers now need to investigate how the customer looks for these products and services, and then market to these customers using their words.
For example, I previously owned a line of gourmet sauces called Big Acres Sauces.
One day, after a lot of testing, I finalized my new “Grilled Bison Burger Recipe” page. I carefully proofread, spell-checked, saved and was about to send the recipe to someone to post on our website.
I stopped because I realized we had not yet checked Google Adwords Keyword Tool to see if people were in fact searching for “bison burger recipe” or whether they were searching for something else.
Well, I was absolutely surprised to find that very few people were searching for bison burger recipe, about 40 local searches in the previous month.
However, the demand for “buffalo burger recipe” was much higher. Local search demand was about 800.
People seemed to be using the word “buffalo” and evidently, had not yet caught on to the other word for buffalo – bison.
So, of course, we changed the name of the recipe to “Grilled Buffalo Burger Recipe” and optimized it for the phrase “buffalo burger recipe.”
We were able to rank for this phrase and caught a lot of traffic.
If we had not checked traffic for this phrase and left the recipe optimized for “bison burger recipe” instead, our recipe could have sat on our site, unvisited by anyone searching.
Figure 1. Current Local search demand in Google Adwords Keyword Tool
Once a page is optimized for search, you should occasionally recheck demand for the phrases used.
Interestingly, in our example, when we rechecked this phrase earlier in 2012, we found that the use of the phrase “bison burger recipe” is now much more popular than “buffalo burger recipe,” mostly due to the growing popularity of this type of meat and the use of the word “bison” in that industry.
Figure 2. Trends for Bison Burger Recipe (blue) vs. Buffalo Burger Recipe (red)
By paying attention to the phrases used in the popular pages on your website, you’ll increase the opportunity to capture search traffic.
Do you have a good example of how you changed the name of an article, blog post or even a product to accommodate search?
We’d love to hear from you!
