Leveraging Content and Mindset to Improve SEO scores

The word ‘Digital’ has captured the imagination of millions of people around the world in the last two decades. The way consumers are interacting with technology is rapidly evolving. Earlier, people used to visit the marketplace to shop, but now things have changed. People are dependent on technology for their day-to-day activities. Their mindset has evolved over a period. 

From the marketers’ point of view, it is essential to note that even consumers are thinking about ROI in their day-to-day life, i.e. a return on the amount of time and money they invest in buying something online. This shift in consumer behavior has created an ROI obsession of sorts.

The Consumer Mindset

Every interaction is made with the purpose of a transaction. We as humans think the same way; whenever we interact with someone, our mind always cautions us on the possibility of it leading to a transaction of some kind. Everybody has witnessed this situation in their everyday life, for e.g. when we often receive a call from the bank, asking us to sign up for a new credit card or avail of their instant loan facilities.

Every possible interaction has become a transaction, but what does this mean? It means that all the brands in the market today can be judged by the customer and attributed ratings or reviews online. When we relate this scenario to content, whatever we create should be robust enough that it makes our reputation rather than break it. 

An advertisement is either accepted or rejected. A piece of content is even more serious business as while we do not see a comment box under an advertisement, a content piece almost always comes with space that says ‘please comment.’ Case in point being the popular newspaper, The Economist, which gets 7 million unique clicks, out of which 80% comments come from the Indian audience. This sheds some light on the mentality of the domestic consumer, about what they like and find engaging. 

What SEOs Need to Know

Knowing the user’s mindset is of the utmost importance to SEOs because the human mind is such that whenever they are looking for an answer, the first thing they do is to Google it! Whenever a user searches on Google, they seek to get a solution to their query by elimination. This means that the user has the option to choose the right content and eliminate other results based on their mediocre content. So it becomes vital for a brand to make sure that their content is aligned with the users’ intent. 

SEO is a gateway for marketers to connect with the audience. It is the most trusted and cost-effective marketing tool that allows a brand to become a trusted publisher of content that is engaging to the audience. Creating content is not only about using technology, but an artistic touch is also vital. It must have a psychographic base along with the knowledge of the brand persona. 

How to Create Appealing Content

Creating content is an art. We need to make sure that our content takes into account users’ thought processes. Storytelling while keeping in mind the user intent, is the key. Our content must have the ability to meet the needs of our target audience. We need to study the culture and habits of the audience we are serving. Demographics are another important factor that is taken into consideration while creating an SEO content plan. If we want to create content which is engaging and resonates with our consumer’s mindset, then it is essential for us to study user psychology. 

Psychographics helps marketers in decision-making. It goes beyond classifying people based on general demographic data, such as age, gender, or race. It focuses on understanding cognitive attributes, such as customer emotions, values, and attitudes, among other psychological factors. 

Marketers also need to understand the importance of brand persona while creating content. Every brand showcases specific values, traits, and attitudes; it is necessary that we understand it and create content accordingly to connect with our audience segment. 

Linking brand persona to unique consumer archetypes lets marketers:

• Address an audience as one not many
• Give a brand many meaningful expressions
• Create meaningful content
• Inspire content and conversations that count

The two essential stages of creating SEO content are Planning and Creation:

Planning

The keywords that the user searches for are identified using various tools. SEMrush is one such tool that helps in identifying the right keywords for content creation. It also helps in linking the keywords that brands use for PPC marketing; this, in turn, helps in better decision making.

It is necessary to know or understand the brand persona well so that content marketers can identify archetypes and keywords that resonate with them. Content IQ is one of the best tools that serve this purpose here, you can run the entire set of keywords through a content archetype indicator bucket/filter. This can help in creating a brand affinity persona(s) that users may like and engage with. 

Creation

The content should be created such that it resonates with consumer preferences and contains relevant keywords. It is essential to create relevant renditions across various content formats for different user archetypes. The content should be created on a regular basis as content cycles are short. Maintain proper SEO hygiene, i.e. use the right keywords in headlines, title metadata, etc.

Measuring the Success of Your Campaign

Calculating ROI is very important when it comes to business, and measuring the time spent on and shares received by your content piece helps in monitoring the success rate. Analyzing the number of impressions a piece of content or page gets is essential while defining success. However, the idea should be to measure the length of engagement on a particular content item that is popular. Higher user engagement ensures that people are liking your content and the chances of getting them to choose your brand (i.e. conversions) increases.

Conclusion

For SEOs, there is an overwhelming number of tools available to better the technical aspect of your brand. However, it is necessary to focus on the human side of the content too as human psychology changes from person to person. Using different forms of content such as infographics, video, etc. in the right way is essential. 

Content should be created based on brand persona with an artistic touch and a sound technical understanding of the craft. It should be such that it effectively conveys the same message to different personalities.

In digital marketing, although the brand may seem to have a one-on-one relationship with the user, in reality, it is of the one-to-many kind as every user is different in their own way. 

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