How can you make sure that when your target audience is looking for a solution, they come across your content? Produce material that addresses client concerns while also boosting SEO.
You have a good possibility of being the answer when a potential consumer uses Google to solve an issue.
There's no denying it. These aren't minor concerns that small business owners discuss with their customers when they pay their bills. Enterprise companies have a great chance of appearing in search engine results pages (SERPs) and converting quality visitors.
If you construct a content strategy around your clients' pain spots, you'll be able to address the root of their problem as well as a slew of other difficulties. Finally, this method expands your SEO opportunities for lower-competition terms that your customers seek.
Let's have a look at some common client complaints.
Assume you're a software provider for legal practise management. One of your potential customers is a law firm that is frustrated with their inability to efficiently manage time.
The financial issue, in turn, is a sign of a far larger problem within the organisation. Because there is no standardised time-tracking system, most people keep track of their time using spreadsheets. Due to the proclivity to ballpark and the risk of human error, the law firm loses a significant amount of money.
So, what's the crux of the matter?
Due to inadequate project management, corporate revenue and profitability are being reduced. Aren't we on to something significant now?
Your software company can now develop a marketing strategy that solves a variety of billing concerns. Here's a rundown of potential consumer annoyances:
- All of your time and expenses in one spot
- Time management analytical tools
- How do you maintain track of case information?
- batches of invoices
- Use UTBMS billing codes for improved billing analysis.
- Billing that is in accordance with the LEDES (Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard),etc.
Because of the connected but diverse targeting, they'll be more likely to notice you in the SERPs when they change their queries and progress through the funnel from ToFu to BoFu.
Key Points
- Customer complaints aren't born out of thin air. They're intertwined with other concerns and can have a big impact on a company's overall success.
- Customer pain points can be identified via research, search data, surveys, polls, conversations with customers and internal teams, and industry studies.
- Customer pain problems can be addressed by mapping customer pain points to the customer journey, building a content and SEO strategy around relevant keywords, and conducting strategic outreach.
- Customer pain points help match content to search intent, which leads to a better user experience and more conversions.
How to leverage the Voice of the Consumer (VoC) to identify customer pain points
Recording the client's voice is the first step in detecting customer pain issues (VoC). Data mining, surveys, and chatting with salespeople, support teams, and customers are just a few of the tools available.
Look for common topics to generate article ideas. Then adjust your messaging to resonate with your target and match their search intent. This method will increase conversions as well as search visibility.
Let's look at a few great methods for learning more about your clients' issues.
It is necessary to conduct market research.
Market research can take a variety of forms. To figure out what your target audience is looking for, you can use search data, social media data, and competitor analytics. What challenges must they address, and what modifiers do they employ to describe their needs?
To gain a more in-depth look at your target market, you may hire market research professionals and analysts.
Traditional market research methods such as focus groups, interviews, and "in the field" observation can also be used. Members of Proctor & Gamble's Tide team, for example, study people using washing machines in their homes. Thanks to this strategy, Tide can gain crucial insight into client issues that they couldn't get any other way.
Customers should be surveyed about their satisfaction.
Your present customers are familiar with your brand and the services you offer. Send out questionnaires to your customers to find out more about how you might help them. If you don't want to miss out on critical information about where you could be falling short, don't lead the jury. To put it another way, you should also seek constructive critique.
Include contextually relevant surveys and polls on your website.
One of the most effective ways to identify pain points is to connect with your audience when their problems are top-of-mind – that is, when they are using your site to find a solution. You can ask your site users contextually relevant questions based on the pages they view. As a result, you may collect high-quality, real-time data via surveys and polls.
Your live chat software can also send out specific messages and enquiries for different websites. As a consequence, you'll be able to collect contextually relevant data that will help you enhance your website and online customer experience (DCX).
Conduct surveys throughout the company.
Conducting an industry-wide survey will provide you with a broad understanding of the subjects, issues, and trends that are significant to your target audience. It can also demonstrate how people's viewpoints have changed throughout time.
You'll get data for these surveys from around the industry, not just from your customers. For example, Whole Foods isn't interested in hearing from just the foodies who shop there right now. They'd like to hear from those who aren't making purchases with them. What are these clients' main concerns?
Whole Foods may or may not be able to make the necessary changes to meet certain needs, while they may do so on occasion. It's just that they're not communicating it correctly. It is Whole Foods' job to reinforce their messaging around their local partnerships in each city if the average organic-loving customer cares about purchasing local and avoids Whole Foods because of it. They must also make certain that their local SEO is up to date.
Industry-wide polls are also a great way to anticipate movements and trends. New technology can change customer behaviour in the blink of an eye, and often in unexpected ways. For example, Tide is interested in learning how "smart" washing machines affect the laundry process. These insights help them to make essential product or messaging improvements.
Get in touch with customer support
Your customer service representatives listen to customer concerns all day! Talk to your customers when they call in to find out what their problems and frustrations are. Your customer service team can frequently reveal the most difficult of your customers' problems.
Then put what you've learnt from those conversations to work on your SEO and content strategy. To codify this procedure, you can use customer support platforms like Zendesk. Your support team will be able to formally document each issue and provide data-rich reports for you to use.
Have a conversation with the salesperson
Your sales team has a better understanding of the features and solutions that your target market is looking for than anybody else. After all, it is their job to sell your products. Inquire about the prospect's discomfort difficulties during phone calls or meetings. Then ask them to describe the most typical objections they hear from prospects and how to reply with the right messaging.
On the other side, do some messages or value props rarely work? This is also crucial information since it enables you to concentrate your SEO efforts more consistently on the messages that work.
Take a look at the discussion boards and comments.
In a survey or over the phone, your clients communicate with one another in a different way than they would with you. Examine the comments on your blog posts and in forums to get a raw sense of what your readers are thinking and feeling.
Online reviews, particularly off-site evaluations, are excellent sources of information. In addition, your customer will frequently describe why they purchased the goods in their review, implying a problem.
Analyst reports are a good place to start.
Consider contacting Forrester, Gartner, IDC, IHS Markit, or another market research firm for a report on your industry. From a third source, these provide objective and extremely insightful insights into client problem situations. They can help you recognise client behaviour and perhaps open your eyes to previously unknown viewpoints.
Collect and organise feedback from the account team.
Account teams work with customers and their issues on a daily basis. What happens after that, though? If there is no set procedure in place to obtain and leverage such intelligence, it will be a missed opportunity. Check to see if your account teams are using a feedback method, and if so, use CRM software.
Simply inquire!
Why speculate what your audience's pain points are when you can just ask? Plan a lunch or dinner for your clients and prospects. Over meals, people relax and speak more than they might in a stuffy corporate meeting room. A restaurant, cafe, or bar could be the perfect place to gain genuine knowledge.
Attend to customer pain points throughout the funnel.
What impact does this have on search engine optimization? Customer complaints supply you with a wide, comprehensive source of information that will give you a competitive edge. You may directly address your audience's top worries and frustrations across the conversion funnel, and provide solutions where your competitors are failing.
Traffic and conversions are generated by a content strategy that focuses on resolving customer issues and is supported by enterprise SEO. To that aim, here's a seven-step process for turning the client pain points you've discovered into SEO gold:
7-Step SEO Process to Address Customer Pain Points
Follow the methods below to boost your SEO efforts across the funnel, based on your audience's real issues:
1. Determine the sources of customer annoyance.
Based on the market research you conducted, write down and prioritise your customers' pain points. Clio, a company that provides project management software for law firms, may concentrate on the problems associated with efficiency loss. Case management that is disorganised, unstructured document management that is disorganised, and billing leakage are just a few instances (as touched upon earlier).
For example, Dick's Sporting Goods would wish to create a different collection of customer pain concerns for each department. Is your target market, for example, a group of experienced campers? Perhaps, but there is a much larger group of uninitiated campers eager to learn. When it comes to the latter market, pain difficulties such as being overwhelmed by too many options when purchasing a tent or hiking boots come to mind.
The most important thing is to jot down your pain points in a systematic way so that you can treat them.
2. Identify and map client pain points to the customer journey.
Customers' challenges alter as they proceed through the decision funnel (from awareness to consideration to preference to purchase).
A consumer in the "awareness" stage of the buying process can start by shopping for a hiking tent. This is because they are unaware of the importance of having a lightweight, weatherproof tent. You can help them solve their problem of not knowing which tent to buy by providing them with guides and articles that will guide them through the process of selecting the ideal tent for their needs.
The buyer will discover as they continue down the funnel that a heavy tent, as well as one that is difficult to set up, is an issue. Oh, and it rains all the time where they live.
As they look for solutions to these issues, they will come across your articles, postings, and videos about the best lightweight tents for wet weather. They'll then narrow their choices down to only a few tents, and they'll know which one they want.
However, there is one more stumbling block: they are unsure if they will use it enough to justify the expense. That's when you can make an offer or provide an incentive to help them make a decision.
This is how you create a customer journey map from the ground up.
3. Carry out keyword research.
Due to their distinct needs, your customers will do various searches at each level of the funnel. So, once you've discovered their pain points and connected them to the customer journey, do some keyword research to see what terms they could look for.
Someone in the "awareness" phase might Google "best tents" or "best family tents" (which, according to Ahrefs, receives over 5,000 monthly Google searches) (1,200 searches). Someone might seek for "best tents for trekking" (450 results) or "best tents for damp circumstances" (450 results) during the "consideration" phase (20 searches).
Make a list of possible keywords for each of your issues. Then, using one of these SEO tool, add more keyword variations to your list.
- Google's Keyword Planner
- Ahrefs' Keyword Explorer
- Moz's Keyword Explorer
- SEMRush
- Soovle
- KeywordTool.io
- KWFinder
Finally, evaluate the statistics to narrow down your alternatives to the most appropriate options based on search volume, competition, and relevancy.
4. Conduct a competitor analysis.
Examine the top-ranked websites, blogs, and other digital properties to see which client pain points they solve in a competitive analysis. Keyword research tools can also be used to see what search terms your competitors are ranking for.
In a variety of ways, these observations are valuable. You'll begin by researching the SEO methods of your competition. It will then be able to set a standard for your content. If a competitor has a 10-page guide on the best rainy-day tents, you should aim to outdo them. Finally, competitive research can aid in the discovery of previously undiscovered pain points and value propositions.
5. Brainstorm content ideas for each stage of the client journey.
Come up with content ideas for each stage of the consumer journey after you've settled on your subjects and keywords. At the top of the funnel, your customer will likely appreciate a 10-page guide or video series because they are only seeking for information. Once consumers know what they want, comparisons, charts, and other types of visual content will help them choose among options. Make a list of ideas for each segment of the funnel as you go, refining the format and purpose along the way.
6. Build content
Put your content ideas into action once you've outlined them. Make a content calendar, allocate responsibility, and connect each piece to a topic, keyword, persona, and funnel phase.
For those who appreciate reading as much as possible while investigating, provide whitepapers and instructions. Create and optimise films and infographics for people who prefer to learn through visual means. Provide podcasts for those who prefer aural intake during their commutes, for example. Make tools available to help your audience make decisions and take action.
Make sure your material is seasonally appropriate. Find out what's hot right now with Google Trends. You might, for example, opt to postpone your wet weather forecast until April. You'll have more flexibility to prioritise depending on search opportunity rather than calendar date if you have "evergreen" content, such as a guide on "how to choose a tent" or comparing pages.
7.Conduct strategic outreach
Last but not least, once you've developed all of your amazing content, don't just sit back and wait for the traffic to come. Reach out to the bloggers who are most likely to be interested in your content ahead of time. Include each piece of content in your social media, email, and PR campaigns as the initial step.
Strategic outreach means going above and beyond the fundamentals. Determine which publications, influencers, and partners would benefit from the material for their individual audiences. Then make it easy for users to share the content or create new content to go with it.
Assume you've made a wonderful video series focused at helping law firms reduce revenue leakage. Legal periodicals and bloggers may choose to just link to your content or to create their own and incorporate your videos.
When possible, do the work for your outreach target. Don't keep them in the dark about the tale or how they'll tell it to their audience.
When done effectively, strategic outreach can assist you in obtaining high-quality, organic backlinks to your content, hence improving your organic search results for those topics and keywords.
The number of searches isn't always the same as the number of conversions.
As you create and implement your SEO strategy, keep a few key considerations in mind. First and foremost, do your homework before allocating half of the next quarter's resources to a high-volume term. If your keyword fails to convert, you'll lose a lot of readers who would never buy anyway.
As an example, consider the following: Despite the fact that "legal company" receives 11,000 monthly Google searches, if you're selling law practise management software, the term is simply too wide and has the wrong search intent to invest in SEO.
The term doesn't apply to the customer difficulties you'd like to focus on. Even if you get a high ranking in the Google SERPs, you can't ensure that the right people will come to your site or that they will have a good time.
All of the terms "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 result in significantly higher conversion rates. This is one of the SEO advantages of long-tail keywords.
Pain points can help you match content to search intent.
Content that solves a real-world problem can help you better match your content to their search intent. Assume you're in the business of selling tents. A quick Google autocomplete search for "music festival tents" exposes one major concern right away: music festival tents flying and blowing away.
In this scenario, the audience's pain point isn't just the obvious one. This search is more complicated than it appears. Our festival goers either didn't properly set up their tent or bought the cheapest tent they could locate. So, if you want to sell tents to them, focus on what they truly want: a low-cost, easy-to-assemble, wind-resistant tent.
When a pain point appears in the autocomplete box right away, it's a good indication that you should focus on those exact phrases, such as "windproof tent," which receives 200 Google searches each month.
More conversions = search intent matching
When you provide a solution to your audience's problem, they are more likely to buy from you.
If it's early in the funnel, on the other hand, they'll appreciate your brand and see it as authoritative. This allows you to guide them through the remaining steps of the funnel.
People want to feel secure in their purchases. Increase your SEO efforts and give them all the information they need, along with a call to action and an enticing offer.