How can you ensure that your target audience finds your material when they are looking for a solution? Produce content that answers client concerns and amplifies them with SEO.
When a potential customer uses Google to solve an issue, you have a great chance to be the answer.
Make no doubt about it. These aren't minor issues that small business owners discuss with customers when they pay out. Enterprise firms have a big opportunity to appear in search engine results pages (SERPs) and get quality traffic that converts.
You'll be able to fix the main cause of your clients' problem as well as numerous related issues if you create a content strategy around their pain points. Finally, this strategy opens up even more SEO prospects for lower-competition keywords that your consumers are looking for.
Key Points
- Customer complaints aren't created in a vacuum. They are linked to other issues and can have a significant impact on a company's overall success.
- Research, search data, surveys, polls, talks with consumers and internal teams, and industry studies can all be used to identify customer pain areas.
- By mapping customer pain points to the customer journey, developing a content and SEO strategy around relevant keywords, and doing strategic outreach, you may address customer pain problems.
- Customer pain points aid in the matching of content to search intent, resulting in a better user experience and more conversions.
Let's take a look at some client pain points.
Assume you're a vendor of law practise management software. A law firm is one of your potential customers, and they're upset with their inability to effectively manage time.
That financial crisis, in turn, is a symptom of a far greater problem within the company. Because there is no standardised time-tracking system, most people use spreadsheets to keep track of their time. The law firm loses a large amount of revenue due to the inclination to ballpark and the possibility of human mistake.
So, what's the core problem here?
Corporate revenue and profitability are being slashed due to poor project management. We're on to something major now, aren't we?
Your software firm can now devise a marketing strategy that addresses a number of associated billing issues. Here's a list of possible consumer pain points:
- Time and expense tracking in one place
- Analytical tools for time management
- How do you keep case information organised?
- Invoicing in batches
- For better billing analysis, use UTBMS billing codes.
- Billing that complies with the LEDES (Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard),
- etc.
They'll be more likely to see you in the SERPs as they change their searches and go through the funnel from ToFu to BoFu thanks to the connected but diverse targeting.
How to use Voice of Consumer (VoC) to discover customer pain issues
The initial step in identifying consumer pain problems is to record the customer's voice (VoC). There are a variety of methods for doing so, including data mining, surveys, and speaking with sales staff, support teams, and customers.
To come up with content ideas, look for common themes. Then, to resonate with your audience and fit their search intent, alter your messaging. This strategy will boost both conversions and search exposure.
Let's take a look at a few terrific approaches to learn more about your clients' problems.
Market research should be carried out.
Market research can take many different shapes. You may use search data, social media data, and competition analytics to figure out what your target audience is looking for. What issues do they need to tackle, and what modifiers do they use to express their requirements?
You might also hire market research experts and analysts to get a more in-depth look at your target market.
You can also employ traditional market research methods like as focus groups, interviews, and "in the field" observation. Members of the Tide team at Proctor & Gamble, for example, observe individuals using washing machines in their homes. Tide can receive vital insight into client difficulties that they couldn't get any other way thanks to this method.
Send customer satisfaction surveys to current customers
Your current clients are well-versed in your brand and the services you provide. Send surveys to your consumers to learn more about how your company can assist them. But don't lead the jury if you don't want to miss out on important information about where you might be falling short. To put it another way, ask for constructive criticism as well.
Include surveys and polls on your website that are contextually relevant.
Connecting with your audience when their issues are top-of-mind – i.e., as they use your site to find a solution – is one of the finest methods to identify pain areas. You can pose contextually appropriate questions to your site visitors based on the pages they visit. As a result, you may use surveys and polls to collect high-quality, real-time data.
Specific messages and queries for different sites can also be triggered by your live chat software. As a result, you'll be able to collect contextually relevant data to improve your website and consumer experience online (DCX).
Conduct surveys across the business
A broad grasp of the subjects, issues, and trends that are relevant to your target audience can be gained by conducting an industry-wide survey. It can also show you how people's opinions have evolved over time.
You'll get data for these surveys not only from your customers, but from the entire industry. Whole Foods, for example, isn't interested in hearing from just the foodies who buy there right now. They'd be interested in hearing from those who aren't purchasing with them. What are the concerns of such customers?
Whole Foods may not be able to make the necessary alterations to fulfil some needs, although they may find that they do so on occasion. They're just not communicating it correctly. If the average organic-loving customer cares about shopping local and avoids Whole Foods because of it, it is Whole Foods' responsibility to reinforce their messaging around their local partnerships in each city. They must also ensure that their local SEO is in good working order.
Industry-wide surveys are also a wonderful tool to spot shifts and trends ahead of time. In the blink of an eye, new technology can alter customer behaviour, frequently in unanticipated ways. Tide, for example, would like to know how "smart" washing machines alter the laundry process. These insights enable them to make necessary changes to their product or messaging.
Contact customer service
Your customer service personnel spends the entire day listening to consumer complaints! When your consumers call in, talk to them to find out what their frustrations and difficulties are. Your support crew can often expose the most difficult of your customers' issues.
Then apply what you've learned from those discussions to improve your SEO and content strategy. You can also use customer support tools like Zendesk to codify this procedure. This enables your support team to formally record each issue and generate data-rich reports that you can use.
Speak with the salespeople
Your sales team knows more than anybody about the features and solutions that your target market is looking for. After all, selling your goods is their job. During phone conversations or meetings, inquire about the prospect's pain issues. Then ask them to explain the most common objections they receive from prospects and how to respond to them with the appropriate messaging.
Do some messages or value props, on the other hand, rarely work? This is also critical information, as it allows you to focus your SEO efforts more consistently on the messages that succeed.
Check out the forums and comments.
Your clients communicate with one another in a different way than they would with you in a survey or over the phone. Examine the comments on your blog posts and on forums to gain unedited insight into what your audience is thinking and feeling.
Online reviews, particularly off-site reviews, are very helpful information sources. And your buyer will frequently mention why they bought the goods in their review, suggesting a problem.
Check out analyst reports.
Consider obtaining a report on your industry from Forrester, Gartner, IDC, IHS Markit, or another market research agency. These provide objective and extremely illuminating insights into customer problem issues from a third party. They can assist you in identifying client behaviour and may even open your eyes to previously unseen perspectives.
Organize input from the account team.
Every day, account teams deal with consumers and their problems. But what happens after that? It's a missed opportunity if there's no set mechanism in place to acquire and exploit such intelligence. Make sure your account teams are using a feedback mechanism, and if necessary, use CRM software.
Just enquire!
When you could just ask, why guess what your audience's pain points are? Organize a lunch or dinner for customers and prospects. People loosen up and converse more over meals than they would in a stuffy corporate meeting room. A restaurant, cafe, or bar might provide the ideal setting for genuine insight.
Throughout the funnel, address consumer pain concerns.
What effect does this have on SEO? Customer pain points create a vast, rich source of insights that will provide you a competitive advantage. Throughout the conversion funnel, you may directly address your audience's top concerns and frustrations and provide answers where your competitors are failing.
A content strategy that focuses on resolving customer issues and is supported by enterprise SEO generates traffic and conversions. To that end, here's a seven-step approach that'll help you turn the client pain issues you've identified into SEO gold:
SEO Process in 7 Steps to Address Customer Pain Points
To increase your SEO initiatives based on your audience's real issues across the funnel, follow the steps below:
1. Identify customer annoyances.
In writing, establish and prioritise your consumers' pain issues based on the market research you completed. A company that supplies project management software for legal firms, such as Clio, may focus on the pain points related with efficiency loss. Unorganized case management, unstructured document management, and billing leaks are just a few examples (as touched upon earlier).
Dick's Sporting Goods, for example, could want to develop a separate collection of consumer pain points for each department. Is your target market, for example, skilled campers in the camping category? Perhaps, but there is a much larger group of casual campers who are eager for knowledge. When it comes to the latter market, you might think of pain issues like being overwhelmed by tool many alternatives when choosing a tent or hiking boots, for example.
The main thing is to write down the pain spots in a systematic manner so that they may be addressed.
2. Identify client pain areas and map them to the customer journey.
Customers' problems don't go away as they progress through the decision funnel (from awareness to consideration to preference to buy), but they do change.
A buyer in the "awareness" phase might begin by looking for a hiking tent. This is due to the fact that they are unaware of the necessity for a lightweight, weatherproof tent. You may alleviate their problem of not knowing which tent to buy by providing them with guides and articles that will assist them in finding the best tent for their needs.
As the consumer progresses down the funnel, they will learn that a hefty tent, as well as one that is difficult to set up, is a problem. Oh, and it's always raining where they live.
Customers will come across your articles, posts, and videos regarding the best lightweight tents for wet weather as they search for answers to these problems. They'll then limit down their options to just a few tents, and they'll know exactly the one they want.
But there's one last stumbling block: they're not sure if they'll utilise it enough to justify the cost. That's when you can make an offer or provide an incentive to help them make a decision.
Here's how you make a customer journey map from scratch.
3.Do keyword research
Your consumers will do different searches at each stage of the funnel due to their unique needs. So, when you've identified their pain issues and mapped them to the customer journey, conduct keyword research to see what terms they could Google.
Someone in the "awareness" phase might look for "best tents" (which, according to Ahrefs, receives over 5,000 Google searches each month) or "best family tents" (1,200 searches). In the "consideration" phase, someone might look up "best tents for trekking" (450 results) or "best tents for wet conditions" (20 searches).
Make a list of keyword suggestions for each of your problems. Then, using one of these SEO tool;, expand your list to include other keyword variations.
- Keyword Planner by Google
- Keyword Explorer by Ahrefs
- Keyword Explorer by Moz
- SEMRush
- Soovle
- KeywordTool.io
- KWFinder
Finally, based on search volume, competition, and relevancy, examine the data to filter down your choices to the most appropriate options.
4. Perform a competitive analysis
Conduct a competitive examination of the top-ranked websites, blogs, and other digital properties to see which client pain points they address. You may also utilise keyword research tools to check what search terms your competitors are ranking for.
These observations are beneficial in a number of ways. You'll start by learning about your competitors' SEO strategies. It can then establish a standard for your material. If a competitor has a 10-page guide on the best rainy-day tents, you should try to come up with something even better. Finally, competitive research can help you identify new pain areas and value propositions that you hadn't previously explored.
5. Come up with content ideas for each stage of the customer experience.
After you've decided on your subjects and keywords, come up with content ideas for each stage of the consumer journey. Your consumer will likely appreciate a 10-page guide or video series at the top of the funnel because they are solely looking for information at that stage. Comparisons, charts, and other sorts of visual content will assist them choose amongst possibilities once they know what they want. Create a list of ideas for each section of the funnel and refine the format and purpose as you go.
6.Build content
Once you've outlined your content ideas, put them into action. Create a content calendar, assign accountability, and link each piece to a topic, keyword, persona, and funnel step.
Provide whitepapers and instructions for folks who enjoy reading as much as possible when researching. Create and optimise films and infographics for folks who learn best visually. For those who prefer aural intake during their commutes, for example, provide podcasts. Provide resources to assist your audience in making decisions and taking action.
Make sure your content is appropriate for the season. Use Google Trends to find out what's trending right now. For example, you might decide to put your rainy weather forecast on hold until April. If you have "evergreen" content, such as a guide on "how to choose a tent" or comparative pages, on the other hand, you'll have greater flexibility to prioritise based on search opportunity rather than calendar date.
7.Conduct strategic outreach
Last but not least, don't just sit and wait for the traffic to come once you've created all of your fantastic content. Be proactive and reach out to the bloggers who are most likely to be interested in your content. The first step is to include each piece of content into your social media, email, and PR campaigns.
Going above and beyond the fundamentals is what strategic outreach entails. Determine which newspapers, influencers, and partners might find the content useful to their respective audiences. Then make it simple for users to share the material or develop new stuff to go along with it.
Assume you've created a fantastic video series aimed at assisting law firms in reducing income leakage. Legal publications and bloggers may choose to merely link to your content, or they may opt to produce their own content and integrate your videos.
Do the job for your outreach target whenever possible. Don't leave them guessing about the story and how they might convey it with their audience.
Strategic outreach, when done correctly, can help you obtain high-quality, organic backlinks to your content, boosting your organic search results for those topics and keywords.
The number of searches does not necessarily equate to the number of conversions.
You'll want to keep a few other factors in mind as you plan and implement your SEO strategy. First and foremost, conduct appropriate research before deciding to devote half of next quarter's resources on a high-volume term. If your keyword doesn't convert, you'll wind up with a lot of readers who were never going to buy anyway.
Here's an illustration: Although "legal firm" receives 11,000 monthly Google searches, if you're attempting to offer law practise management software, the keyword is simply too broad and has the improper search intent to invest in SEO.
The word doesn't address the client issues you want to concentrate on. Even if you were able to obtain a high spot in the Google SERPs, you can't guarantee that the correct people would visit your site or that they will have a positive experience.
"Law firm software," "legal software," "legal practise management software," "case management software," "law firm technology," "law firm management," "law firm billing," "law firm profitability," "case management," "law firm case management," and "how to run a law firm" would all result in significantly higher conversion rates. This is the SEO benefit of using long-tail keywords.
Pain points assist you in aligning content with search intent.
Content that addresses a real problem can help you match your content to their search intent more closely. Assume you're trying to sell tents. A short search for "music festival tents" on Google's autocomplete reveals one major issue immediately away: music festival tents flying and blowing away.
The audience's pain point isn't merely the obvious one in this case. There's more to this search than meets the eye. Our festival attendees either didn't put up their tent properly or bought the cheapest tent they could find. So, if you want to sell tents to them, your keywords should focus on what they really want: a low-cost, easy-to-assemble, wind-resistant tent.
When a pain point pops up immediately in the autocomplete, it's a solid sign that you should target those specific phrases, such as "windproof tent," which receives 200 Google searches each month.
More conversions = matching search intent
When you offer your audience a solution to their problem, they are more likely to purchase from you.
Alternatively, if it's early in the funnel, they'll enjoy your brand and regard it as authoritative. This gives you the opportunity to lead them through the remainder of the funnel.
People want to be comfortable with their purchase. Increase your SEO efforts and provide them with all the information they require, all coupled to a call to action and an irresistible offer.