Content Strategy - Developing a content framework
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To be successful you have to know what the market wants. This is business 101. The same applies to building a content framework. To be successful, you have to know what the searchers want, and then give it to them. In the book Waiting For Your Cat To Bark, Jeffrey and Brian Eisenberg classify visitors into four categories:
Accidentals. Some find you accidentally and are not in the market for your goods or services, certainly not now and maybe not ever.
Knows Exactly. These people know exactly what they want, down to the model number (or its equivalent).
Knows Approximately. Next are the people who know approximately what they want. They are in the market to buy, but they have not made their final decision on exactly what they want to buy.
Just Browsing. And then there are those people who are in "browsing" mode. They're window shoppers who aren't necessarily planning to take any specific action.
When developing your content, consider three visitor types: Knows Exactly, Knows Approximately and Just Browsing.
Next, you must find what it is those visitors are looking for. There are several ways to do this.
Surveys - I find that surveys have an extremely poor return rate and usually do not contain anything that you can't find out using other methods. You may have been more successful with surveys, but they did not work for me.
Analytics - Your analytics has hidden treasure inside: keyword referrals. Dig out ALL keyword referrals, be it 40 keywords or 4000. (I realize that keyword referral data is limited to content that you have on the website; however, there is still a wealth of data there).
Keyword Research Tools - Keywords, especially long tail keywords, show intention, and it is our business to find out the intentions of searchers and develop content accordingly.
Next: Using Analytics Keyword Data to Uncover Intention >>
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