Understanding your audience;
Agile thinking & our content
BrightonSEO
18th September 2015
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Charlie Williams
Head of Marketing
charlie (at) white.net
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Content = our best method to
offer a unique experience in
markets increasingly filled with
similar products
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Putting the audience first
We can harness the power of our
audience to build better content
experiences
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A story…
About how I learned
to make content
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A story…
About how I first learned
to make content
with ferries
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What I’ve built…
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ferries to France
What I’ve built…
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ferries from France
ferries to France
What I’ve built…
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France ferries
ferries from France
ferries to France
What I’ve built…
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France ferries
ferries from France
ferries to France
What I’ve built…
And more… oh dear
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Optimising for search query topic
buckets, not individual keywords
Thinking in topics
https://moz.com/blog/topics-people-
over-keywords-rankings-whiteboard-
friday/
http://www.socialmediatoday.com/cont
ent/future-seo-topics-instead-keywords
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& content marketing
SEO content, keyword research,
UX, content strategy, social media,
= Content development
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Agile
Richard Prowse
https://gathercontent.com/blog/adopting-agile-approach-content
helps organisations … focus on
meeting user needs, prioritising
delivery and helping people to
collaborate
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An agile project is about creating
fast iterations of products based
on the feedback of real users -
Prioritise features for users over
everyone else Gov.uk
https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/agile
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But…
Agile’s for developers, right?
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content marketing & agile approach
SEO content, keyword research,
UX, content strategy, social media,
= Content development
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@pagesauce
https://moz.com/blog/user-behaviour-data-as-a-ranking-signal
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Build great content
= the new content is king…
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Product pages
How do we make these great?
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Challenging or new industries
What counts as great content?
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Helping the audience
needs?
So, how do we create content that
actually serves our audience’s
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Questions
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When you do a search, you
generally want an answer
Gabriel Weinberg
http://www.fastcompany.com/3026698/inside-
duckduckgo-googles-tiniest-fiercest-competitor
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Types	
  of	
  searches
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Listening to
the audience
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Google Analytics
Understand what is working;
what does your audience enjoy?
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Google Analytics
Understand what is working;
what does your audience enjoy?
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What’s earned your
audience’s interest?
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What’s earned your
audience’s interest?
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talking about?
What is our audience
Topsy
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content
User testing
Eye-opening insight into what
your audience wants from your
https://www.usertesting.com/product/videos-and-metrics
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results
Surveys
Ask you audience what they
want & incentivise for best
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questions
Questions
Competitor FAQs & Quora
for researching common
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User-centric
keyword research
Quality keyword research
unveils your audience’s needs
http://www.momentology.com/7216-user-centric-keyword-research-topics/
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SEMrush
Dig into the topics your
competitors earn traffic with
http://refugeeks.com/semrush/
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Google Trends
Plus, related terms
Is this a growing topic?
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Scrape Google suggest
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Kewordtool.io
KeywordKiwi
Ubersuggest
Scrape Google suggest
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User stories
audience wants, & map the journey
Take your personas, & what your
https://gathercontent.com/blog/adopting-agile-approach-content
https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/agile/writing-user-stories.html
https://yougov.co.uk/profiler
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Wireframes
Be able to show how your content
will work
Balsamiq Mockups
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http://backlinko.com/skyscraper-technique
An example
To get your own ideas going
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Tell your stories of your product
product or service
Content can be about the user
experiences to be had with your
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Agile thinking
helps our SEO in two ways:
Focus on one issue at a time,
& helping us understand the
audience, so we know what to
make
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charlie (at) white.net
THANK YOU
Questions?
@pagesauce

Understanding your audience; Agile thinking & our content - BrightonSEO September 2015