[Build Backlinks Online] Is Your Content Strategy Guided by Audience Intent (or Just Keywords)?

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Is Your Content Strategy Guided
by Audience Intent (or Just Keywords)?'

Posted by Laura.Lippay

All too often I see content strategies that:Look at what people are searching
for (keyword research).
Create landingpages for as many keywords as possible.
Write gobs of (often meaningless) keyword-optimized content.
This is a typical old-schoolSEO strategy, but what about audience
(visitor)intent?
There's a lot of focus in SEO around optimized landing pages(as there should
be).An optimized landing page has a targeted topic and keywords, a targeted page
title, a clean URL, a compelling meta description, intuitive layout and
navigation, loads quickly, looks amazing, and has calls to action most likely
above the fold.

Content, on the other hand, is more than just optimized landing pages. Content
serves a purpose. Contentcan givea company an advantage over it's
competitors.Content is a
means of communicating and building a relationship with an audience.

What is audience intent?

That coreaudience you're trying to attractneeds something. Maybe they're
researching the best hiking vacations around the globe. Maybe they want to know
where they could go hiking specificallyin Utah. Maybe they know they want to go
hiking in Utah and are looking for Utah vacation packages that include hiking.
Or maybe they just need to book a trip from Boston to Park City. Their intent
can be very vague or very specific, and when coming up with content for a
landing page you need to put yourself in the mind of your audience and consider
what it is that they really want to see. The audience intent would consider:

What kind of contentwould help to easily and satisfactorily meetthe intent of
that visitor?
If the intent is vague (ex: "hairstyles"), what are the various types of
intents that they may have? Ex: hairstylehow-to videos, hairstyle
lookbooks,short hairstyles, long hairstyles, hairstyles for curly hair, thin
hair, frizzy hair,specific hairstyles like up-do's, braids, etc.
What would they consideruseful?
What would they consider interesting orengaging?
What would theyconsidersharable?





The basic requirements of content strategy

A great piece of content requires all of the things a great landing page does
(when the content is indeed a landing page,as opposed to other types of content
like white papers, videos, guides, maps, etc.). Agreat content strategy, though,
considers a bit more beforehand, primarily:
What are the goals of this content (why are we creating it)?
What are the goals for the business (how do we make money)?
What does it need to solve for the consumer (what is the audience intent)?
And after thoughtful research around the audience needs and competitive
landscape, it addresses this question:

How do we build something that meets (and exceeds) user intent, while
satisfying our business goals, and is better than anything else out there?


Let's look at these considerations in real-life examples of content strategies.
These examples clearly differentiatebetween simply building landing pages and
writing copy vs. coming up with creative ways to meet audience intentions and
business goals.


Content strategyexample 1:
Content vs. lifestyle



The company in this scenario is currently purely transactional.


The setup (in brief):


Audience: Women age 25-55, typically moms.
The audience need/intent: Discover smart and innovative ways to be awesome and
live fabulously while being budget-conscious.
Content goals: Extend the currently purely transactional brand into a lifestyle
brand through an extensive, multidimensional content plan.
Business goals: Sell product online.
Previous attempts at content by the company have fallen flat (as have similar
attempts by their primary competitors). No one reads their blogs and hasty
attempts at launching content pieces have been more or less crickets.

Much of this has to do with a transactional company trying to have a voice
when no one is expecting them to talk. A brand without a clear voice and no
authoritative experts or influencers, launching random bits of content is not a
likely win situation. From an audience standpoint it raises more questions than
advocacy - Why is this content here? Will there be more? Why should I consider
them the authoritative voice in (topic), especially when there are many more
authoritative voices out there dedicating entire websites and lifestyles to
these topics?


Lifestyles in this case is the key. Producing content is very different than
immersing your brand ina lifestyle:



CONTENT


LIFESTYLE


Landing pages


Self-expression


Articles


Community


Blog Posts


Culture


Videos


Identity


Slideshows


Associations


Guides


Experience


Maps


Emotion


Consider these brands embracing lifestyles through content. They're all there
to sell product, but their content attracts and engages audiences, draws them in
like moths to flames. Their content isn't based on keywords and optimized
landing pages, it's based on giving their audiences what they need and getting
them excited about it in the process.


GoPro: Be inventive, buy cameras.



Nike: Do sports, buy shoes.







Airbnb: Travel hip, rent places.



Martha Stewart: Be crafty, buy products.







The approach proposed for this particular client in this example:Client: Live
fabulously on a budget, buy products.
See how that's different from this?
Client: Optimized landing pages derived from high-volume keywords, buy products.
The content strategy involves weekly collections, guides, a magazine-style
approach to daily content, evergreen marketing pieces and special approaches to
holidays, plus acquisitions and partnerships with influential people in the
space and potentially a branded "voice of the company" personality doing TV
appearances and PR and promoting the content.

Of course this content strategy took several months and a lot of research. In a
future post I'll go into detail on the processand tools availablefor putting
together a comprehensive content strategy.

Content strategyexample 2:
Articles vs. awesome content


This client was an online magazine targeted at women, with several top-level
categories on the site like fashion, beauty, etc. presented in one of two
formats: slideshows or articles.

The setup:
Audience: Primarily women, primary age group: 35-55.
The audience need/intent: Get fashion and beauty inspiration,tips,ideas.
Content goals: Reach and engage more women.
Business goals: Page views (ad impressions).
The easy part of this content strategy was the architecture. The
currentarchitecture was so basic that keyword research alone was enough to
provide some great insight into what the audience was looking for that the
online magazine was providing but in no clear architectural way. There were
quick wins to be had like creating subcategorical landing pages like Spring
Trends and Summer Trends under Fashion Trends.

The bigger challenge: The competition. Women's fashion and beauty is a highly
competitive space online. Creating landing pages does not mean they will come.
This content needed a more creative "how can we do something better" eye. From
the typical SEO mindset you can think of it as "how can we create something that
people will link to, share and engage with more than our competitors?"

We utilized several research avenues, primarily:
Market research on online beauty and fashion trends.
Extensive competitive research.
Extensive research into trends on what's popular in beauty and fashiononline and
in social networks.
And we found all kinds of cool things that the online magazine could be doing
to attract and engage more women. In the end the content strategy
proposedfeatureslike:
Videos or slideshows comparing different makeup brands (example: different
thick lash mascaras or long-lasting lipsticks).
Makeover tools.
Various types of "lookbooks" for things like pixie hairstyles, colorful eyeliner
ideas, nail trends, etc.
Working with brand partners to deliver samples boxes to subscribers.
A series on recreating celebrity looks for less (and where to buy).
Local fashionista bloggers in major cities who blog on where the latest coolest
fashion finds, fashion events and fashionable places to be are in that city.
Weekly collections/series around various topics like This Weeks Cutest Shoes (in
your inbox), Must-Have Dresses, Craziest Fashion Trends, etc.



This was presented within the newly proposed architecture with cross-linking
opportunities and optimization recommendations (especially around video, images
and social sharing) for a complete content strategy.
Content strategyexample 3:
Selling vacationpackages


An airline sells vacationpackages that include flights and tours of the area
they mainly fly into. They have the packages on the site but they're performing
pretty poorly.

The setup:
Audience: Adult international travelers coming from the United States.
The audience need/intent: Find things to do in the area, find tours in the area,
find vacation packages, plan a vacation in the area.
Content goals: Attract, engage and convert more people.
Business goals: Primary: sell flights. Secondary: sell packages.
Here are the things I looked at in preparation for their content strategy:
What do searches tell us about the various types of intent the searchers have?
People may be searching a specific attraction or they may be looking for hiking
tours. We found at least 4 high-level ways to slice and dice intent (in addition
to looking for packages): By specific attraction name, by town, by type of
attraction (ex: waterfalls), or by activity (ex: bird-watching).
Does the site architecture currently meet those intents? In fact, no. The
architecture was somewhat random. It is difficult to find some of the things on
the site based on those 4 types of intent. Some of the content that could be
easily cross-sold was also buried as landing pagesin the packages section.
How do visitors with these intents navigate the site now? We did user testing
asking visitors to find and book a specific attraction and to find and book a
specific activity. Many were unable to complete the tasks, and all of them went
about it in completely different ways. We learned a lot about what people expect
to find and how they expect to find it that could help guide our content
strategy(including additional types of intent like time of year the package is
available for instance).
What content assets do we have to work with? A content inventory was done with a
sample size of content currently in season andlive on the site,and content out
of season that they currently remove from the site. Each page was "tagged" with
the specific attractions, towns, type of "thing to see," and activities that
were included in the package along with package price, travel period, whether or
not it includes a flight, departure airport, number of nights.

With all of this in mind, the end content strategy proposed things like:
Architecture: An updated architecture with landing pages to meet the specific
major intents.
Navigation: A newly proposed navigation (which is slightly different from the
architecture).
URLs: Of course.
Tools: A proposed filtering tool/system to filter anything from type of activity
involved to price range to number of nights and everything in-between.
On-Page: On-page content recommendations based on what we learned from user
testing + adding in related content for higher engagement and search-friendly
cross-linking of relevant content and pulling things like transportation options
out from being a buried landing page under packages to being a module
cross-linked from relevant package pages.
Seasonal content treatments: Adding the ability to book packages that aren't in
season right now + how to address long term landing pages for seasonally
available or annually changing content.
Rather than just creating landing pages and optimizing them based on what
people are searching for, we took an approach to this content based on the
various types of user intents people may have that may bring them to the site
and ultimately book a package.
Remember, we're creating content for people, not search engines
It all goes hand-in-hand. When you create something that your audiences like,
that they link to more, share more, andengage with more, it's likely to affect
search engine rankings and traffic, too. Of course this isn't your good ol'
typical "SEO," but its also not 1999. The best SEO isand for many years has
beena good product, so taking the time to consider your audience intentions when
creating a content strategy can pay off in more ways than one.
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