Elaine Pasini

Don’t throw money at in-house or external SEO and marketing bods if they don’t explain their strategy to you first. I’m talking about business strategies that incorporate marketing and sales for healthy cashflow and long term profits. Whether it’s a large corporation or a smaller business entity, knowing who you are selling to will help you and your team in the long run.

In today’s digital age, businesses are continually seeking innovative ways to attract new leads and foster long-term growth.

Central to achieving your business goals is an in-depth understanding of your target market and the creation of content that resonates with your audience. I know, I’ve been helping organisations do this for decades now. 

The approach I focus on here, not only helps in gaining new leads but also establishes a business’s authority in its industry. I’m going to impart WHY elements within this strategy are essential and how each contributes to sustained business growth through. Yes, SEO best practice is still very much alive and kicking complementing GenAI’s prompts and citations.

Understanding Your Audience through Market Research 

Your own firm’s market research should be tailored to your services (or goods) that can help or educate your perfect client. It’s part of a longer term goal for converting leads into loyal clients. 

With the content you put “out there” it needs to educate, inform, and entertain to attract your perfect audience and motivate them to take action. You’ll hear the term “call to action” in marketing, and that’s exactly the punctuation required for all of an organisation’s content. 

Market research itself can come in many forms, depending on what your firm’s ultimate goals are. The process helps provide insights into consumer behaviour, preferences, and pain points. 

By analysing the researched data, businesses can make informed decisions about product development, marketing strategies, and its overall business direction. Without these insights, companies risk making assumptions on what their ideal clients want from them, leading to ineffective strategies and wasted resources. Time is money after all, so invest in research initially because optimising your website and resource materials with incorrect messages and keywords will bring in the wrong audience and search engines will rank you ineffectively for your business strategy.  

The Power of Researched Keywords for Targeted Content 

Any business not utilising SEO (Search Engine Optimised) content with targeted keywords is missing a lucrative tip. SEO best practice improves a website’s visibility on search engines. Google has been the Godfather of search engines globally for decades, but with Bing being in the forefront of GenAI, it’s catching up quickly.  

When potential clients search for relevant terms, optimised content ensures that your business appears in the search results. Let’s face it, you want to be in the top three of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), but with GenAI (although very experimental still) the ideal now is to have your organisation’s content cited in the results.

The power of having researched keywords is higher visibility leads which increase organic website traffic, providing a steady stream of potential leads without the need for paid advertising. I’m not saying Ads are bad, on the contrary, they can be extremely effective for marketing as long as the keywords used in the ads don’t supersede your organic (SEO) content.

HOW TO FORMAT A BLOG  THAT GETS FOUND BY GOOGLE & BING

High-quality, keyword-rich content positions a business as an authority in its field. When a website consistently provides valuable information that answers user queries, it builds trust and credibility. Over time, this authority translates into higher rankings on search engines, which in turn, enhances visibility and attracts more potential hot leads (the ones you want, not randoms!).

WHAT GOOGLE WANTS FROM YOUR WEBSITE & BLOGS 

If you click on the above blog, you will see my top tips on how to get your blogs and website content found in search results and cited in GenAI searches. 

Keyword researched targeted content ensures that the information you provide on your website and wider digital content deliverables (video, social media etc) is relevant to your audience’s interests and needs. Engaging content that speaks directly to your target market encourages online users to spend more time on your website, explore further within the site (what I would then measure from analysing my client’s Google Analytics to inform which pages are liked, which are sticky and which aren’t getting any traction). It takes time for leads to trust and convert into clients. It’s all about speaking to them as if they were your only client – balance these strategies with networking and sales and you’re onto a winner.

Writing for Your Audience

I’ve been an SEO specialist for a long time now and I can safely say that SEOs or internal marketers that write for a robot in the hope of getting ranked highly won’t have consistent longevity online. 

I won’t bother going into detail in this blog about how many times a year Google has updates and how they impact a website’s health, but if you’re curious about how your own site is doing, Sistrix offers a free check. https://www.sistrix.com/free-tools/

CAUTION – IF YOU DON’T CANCEL YOUR FREE TRIAL SISTRIX WILL AUTOMATICALLY PUT YOU ON ITS PAID MODEL AFTER THE TRIAL ENDS

What is the audience-centric approach in content writing within a marketing strategy? 

Writing with your market researched audience in mind ensures that the content you write addresses their specific needs, questions, and pain points that you can help them solve.

Google’s recommendations the following questions you or your SEO specialist writer focuses on:

• Do you have an existing audience or a newly researched ideal audience for your business and its website that would find the content useful if they came directly to you?
• Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge?
• Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?
• After reading your content online, will your audience leave it feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
• Will someone reading your website content leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience?

An audience-centric approach fosters a deeper connection with potential clients, increasing the likelihood of conversion and repeat business. 

By regularly writing high-quality content will keep your audience engaged, which means they’ll also come back to your business for more. By consistently providing value, your business can nurture long-term relationships with their audience. This sustained engagement is critical for maintaining a loyal client base and generating continuous leads, as well as offering collaborators and referrals a peace of mind as to your firm’s worth.

Adaptation in markets

As audience preferences and behaviours evolve, businesses must adapt their content strategies accordingly. Ongoing market research will help identify these shifts, enabling companies to update their content to stay relevant. 

Adapting to changes ensures that the business remains in tune with its audience, fostering long-term growth. Existing client surveys are an easy way to track behavioural changes and needs.

Competitor research is a no brainer too. 

Keyword Research for Engaging Content 

Effective keyword research is the foundation of SEO success for any business with an online presence. 

Identifying and targeting the right keywords that your ideal clients are going to want to read is done via a well thought out method. 

Once you or your SEO has carried out their keyword research (which might be a good time to do some competitor research too – check out their healthy URLs) then it’s time for your content to be optimised in the back end of your website. 

Optimisation of content means that your keywords are included in the copy (never spam the words), add them in Titles, Headers and Meta Descriptions to allow the search engines to easily crawl your pages on your website to thereafter INDEX the pages and then enhance your ranking capabilities.

Don’t forget to add keywords that relate to your company in all images – it’s called ALT TEXT and is for accessibility reasons (in accordance with the Equality Act 2010). While I’m on this subject, all images in your social media platforms should be Alt Text’d too. 

With all my clients that I write for I always optimise their website content and images.

Quality Over Quantity

While it’s important to produce regular content, quality should never be compromised. Google and Bing etc will always prioritise high-quality, relevant content that provides real value to users. 

While expertise and authoritativeness help gain better a ranking, trustworthiness is also a positive catalyst for Google to appreciate, so it’s important that visitors to your website feel the six need states :

• Surprise Me
• Help Me
• Reassure Me
• Educate Me
• Impress Me
• Thrill Me

In conclusion, to understand what your ideal client searches for online, and WHY,  you need to do your market research. Once you know what they want to read and why, you can then research keywords to optimise your content. 

Keyword Research

I’m not going to lie, this is one question that as Director of Pickled Ginger Marketing, I was asked the most. Clients, friends, people on social media etc etc would ask me this question and it was clear they all wanted me to give them a really simple answer as to how they would find their perfect keywords for online growth.

There’s no easy answer keyword research for SEO purposes. There’s no free tool or app online that can give you that answer. 

What I can say is that if you are serious about your business, then you need to integrate Google Search Console, Google Analytics as well as Bing’s Webmaster Tool. From there you can do some serious analysis. 

Most Google Ads experts will use various (paid) software tools to help with keywords but they will also use Google Analytics too.

However, your own market research of how existing clients may have found you online by sending out surveys would be a great start. Also looking at competitors who are doing well in the search results and gauging their content and what their snippets on Google or GenAI come back with will give you a good idea of what’s working.

My own call to action is simple, CONTACT ME if you would like an informal chat to see how I could help your business thrive.

Elaine