Businesses have always seen SEO and Content Marketing as separate entities, but as Google continues to update its search algorithm to reward websites with high-quality content, the dovetailing of SEO and Content Marketing efforts has become a necessity for success on Google’s search engine results page (SERP).

To develop great content pieces, businesses would first need to understand the queries that people are searching and in turn, provide relevant answers through content marketing. In the following, I’ll touch on how businesses can leverage data from keyword research to supercharge their content marketing efforts.

Keyword Research: Explore Keyword Opportunities

Here are some tips to help identify keyword opportunities.

Gear up with the right tools

To discover good keyword opportunities, you’ll need the help of keyword tools, and there are a number of affordable tools out there. One that I highly recommend is Keywordtool.io

Brand keywords

Start by looking at what users are searching with regard to your brands. Use Keywordtool.io and key in your brand name/product to generate an extensive list of keywords and questions.

Category Keywords

A step further from brand keywords would be category keywords. Look for common questions/queries that users are searching for that are relevant to the broader brand/product category. Example: If you are a shampoo brand, the category keywords would be the ones surrounding the term shampoo and hair. You can even go a step further by looking into keywords related to themes like beauty.

Competitor Keywords

Gaining insights into your competitor would be an excellent way to understand the keywords you should be optimising. With a tool like Keywordtool.io, you can input your competitor’s website to generate a list of keywords that your competitor is currently targeting.

Complementary Brands

Look out for brands that your product/service offerings can complement and explore keywords relating to that brand. If you sell smartphone cases, your product would complement large brands like Apple and Samsung. These brands and their products generate a ton of search interest where you can discover a ton of keyword opportunities.

Real-time and Seasonal Trends

You’ve probably seen brands like IKEA killing it with fantastic real-time content marketing efforts. Similarly, you can do keyword research to expound on trending topics and explore search phases that can provide insights to kickstart an award-winning content marketing piece. Look into breaking news, seasonal trends or major sporting/pop culture events to discover great keyword opportunities.

1-1 Sessions with Target Audience

Such sessions will be able to give you a holistic understanding of your target audience’s psychographics. If you sell baby products; have a 1-1 with mums and find out her needs and understand her search behaviour. i.e. the thing she googles for that are relevant to motherhood.

Mapping Keyword Research Data to Content Marketing Efforts

After concluding the keyword research portion, lets’ proceed to the fun part: Mapping keyword data to content marketing opportunities. To make things structured, here are four different content pillars which you could use to structure your content marketing efforts.

Brand-Centric Content

Earlier we talked about keywords & questions related to your brand. Such questions can be added to your Website FAQs. You can also take the chance to create an FAQ page if you don’t already have one. For more complex issues, produce long-form articles or step-by-step videos to help address the users.

Functional/Educational Content

Content marketing efforts should also extend to address common issues that your target audiences face. Create long-form articles, infographics or videos to educate your target audience on specific topics or help resolve their issues.

Trending/Fun Content

Content Marketing isn’t complete if there is no element of fun! Leveraging on the keyword data you’ve discovered while catching up on trending topics, you can also look into producing content based on the latest pop culture phenomenon. The key is knowing how to tie back to your brand. A good example would be this Game of Thrones content by Social Listening Tool, Meltwater. The content uncovered the most popular characters on GOT based on data garnered with their tool

Partnerships

Partnerships are a great way to expand reach beyond your own platform and clientele. Using keyword data uncovered from complementary brands as well as competitor brands, you might discover great co-branding opportunities with other brands.

Fitting the content into the consumer journey

To maximise your dollar, understanding the consumer journey and knowing the type of content that takes precedence in the various stages are key.

Awareness Stage

User Behavior: Users know very little about your brand, and they are not interested in making a purchase yet.

Content that takes precedence: The consumer won’t be interested in a brand-centric content, but a fun/trending content might capture their attention.

Platform & Distribution: The best place to reach and engage users in the awareness stage would be social platforms such as Facebook/Instagram coupled with targeted social ads to reach the right audience demographic.

Call to Action: In this stage, social media engagement metrics like likes, shares and reactions would suffice; A bonus if you can drive them to your website.

Consideration Stage

User Behavior: The user is already familiar with the brand, or they are currently looking to procure products/services your business provides.

Content that takes precedence: Being in the consideration phase will mean users are doing their research and due diligence. Brands can come in with functional/educational content to support user’s research efforts.

Platform & Distribution: This is where your keyword research comes in handy, by optimising your content with search optimised keywords, you increase the chance of users discovering you on Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERPs).

Call to Action: Driving traffic to your product pages and collecting user’s contact details

Conversion Stage

User Behavior: This is the stage where the user is most likely to make a purchase, but due to some reasons, users tend to drop out and eventually drift away. Businesses should never take things for granted. Instead, they should always go the extra mile to optimise conversion rate.

Content that takes precedence: Businesses can start pushing out brand-centric content like case studies, product guides and content that articulates the product’s point of difference.

Platform & Distribution: To optimise conversions, remarketing ads on are the most effective. Remarking ads are targeted only at users who have visited specific pages on the brand’s website. I,e, Users who have shown interest and are likely to convert.

As some users might not be inclined to purchase the first time round, remarketing serves as a reminder and after prolonged visibility, they might be influenced to make the purchase. To increase the chances of conversion, throw in an additional discount to entice users.

Cart abandonment emails are also extremely useful to improve conversions when a user for some reason decides to exit the page after placing an item in the shopping cart. A personalized email can be sent to remind/encourage them to reconsider and eventually make the purchase.

Call to Action: Needless to say, sales and conversions are what you should be looking for at this stage.

Knowing how SEO and Content Marketing can work together, do you still think that SEO and Content Marketing efforts should be conducted separately?

Read More: Learnings from Google Webmaster Conference 2019