Building content for bringing high user intent traffic [real cases]

[TL;DR at the end]

Been there before.

Bringing traffic to your website — traffic that is not your customers.

Why invest and put so much effort into overdone SEO practices, like engaging in link building, searching for the best keywords, producing tons of blog posts, hoping they will bring you customers or contribute to growth? Why?

I'm a self-learner; I've learned all about SEO & content marketing over the last 5 years while working on two different startups from day one. I’ve had some f*ck-ups and ‘realizations’ and want to share them with you.

So..

How to bring targeted traffic that are your potential customers?

First, you need to identify your target audience—who are your customers? And be clear (for yourself first) about what PROBLEM your product SOLVES.

Then, create high-quality content around it. Not just researching keywords and generating content, but based on your interaction with your CUSTOMERS and LEADS, try to understand them and build content specifically for their profiles.

Engage with users and customers, learn who they are, understand their psychodemographics. Then, create content to help them with their problems (remember, marketing is about helping people achieve their goals and solve their problems).

If you focus on content quality that covers a topic fully and provides effective solutions, your page will naturally rank for keywords (also, authority will come with backlinks). In this case, you don't even need to invest in paid SEO tools.

Also, if you give a solid solution to a problem in a blog post, your customers will find your content even if it's on the 3rd page of search results.

Think about it – when we search on Google, we don't stay on a page reading an article that doesn't answer our questions. So what do we do? Leave? Lol, NO! We keep searching until we find what we're looking for.

NOTE: This approach is not suitable for news websites, vacancy listings, movie streaming platforms, or any sites where pure traffic equals revenue.

In short, wear your ideal customer profile shoes and act on your content as if you’re directly talking to him in person, answering his questions fully.

THERE'S NO NEED TO HOPE TO SEE A HIGH TRAFFIC TREND ON THE GRAPH.

Maybe your product has a very small pool of customers, like 10K globally. Then what? Will you cry over 300/mo traffic? Or will you expect and hope to see 100K traffic? Maybe SEO guys in the competing product are searching them, increasing the keyword volume? There are so many overlooked nuances that you should consider before working on SEO strategy.

Now the question is..

How to create content strategy for your product if you don't know your ICP?

What if you don’t know who your customers are?

This scenario occurs mostly for startups, especially those in the early stages—where you build something, but you don’t clearly know who it is for, who’s gonna use it.

Content marketing is about meeting with users in the stage of their user lifecycle.

If we don’t know whom to target, then how should we create a content strategy?

Take this example. In our first startup, Nextsale—a Shopify top 10 app, everything was blooming and shiny from the SEO side. We had many articles that were in the first result of SERP, and customers were into our content, and conversion rates were considerably good.

Why? We knew exactly who our customers were: Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce merchants. We knew our high-intent users and whom we target.

But for the second startup (an eCommerce platform), things were different. Having the confidence "I got this," I started building a content strategy that was targeting customer profiles without knowing that for a product like this, we can pivot, and the customer profile might change.

After 2 pivots, making the content strategy upside down twice, I finally realized what should have been done instead.

When in the early stages of marketing, create a focus group—your early adopters, a tiny group of 1-10 people. Engage with them so much as it's your only job. You will find common points and insights.

Then, start building your content to retain them, keep them engaged and move them from one stage (i.e., engagement) to another (i.e., user).

Remember that people don't search for a feature, and they don't care which feature will solve a problem. They are looking for a solution.

TL;DR:

• Forget SEO reports (traffic, clicks, etc.), focus on creating quality content;
• What's quality content? Quality content should be the exact answer (solution) to a searched question (problem, specific cases, etc.). You can read from Google Search Central for more about helpful content;
• Talk to customers, understand them, their motives, behavior, why they want to solve X?;
• then try to help them to solve their problems with your content (your support tickets, or random interaction with leads are great resources).

At the end of the day, it's P2P - people to people. If you provide value and a commitment to helping them, you'll receive the same in return.