Create content. Publish. Look at analytics. Decide new topic. Rinse and repeat.
Sound familiar? You’re on the “content treadmill” and not going anywhere, neither are your conversion rates. Your conversion rate stagnation stems from not being able to put that content into the right context to your website visitors, and on the flip side, not understanding the context of your website visitors to create more customer-centric content.
Content strategists focus a lot on deciding the right topic and then hoping the right topic will be enough to entice the right audience. Publish it and they will come.
But, from your visitor’s point of view, the content that is being churned out does not resonate, and the information they do need is not there.
Think this is isn’t about your site? Think again. When 98 percent of consumers reported abandoning a purchase because of incomplete or incorrect content, this is too big of a risk to take. Even the most data-obsessed marketers will have room to improve their conversion rates with a more customer-centric eye toward content.
What it Takes to Understand Your Customers
Focus groups, surveys, polls, one-on-one interviews – the science of understanding why your customers buy your products and services has no shortage of tools. When it comes to digital experiences, specifically, there is a critical tool in the toolset that is going unused for many marketers: site search analytics.
What questions do your different personas seek to answer throughout their journey from prospect to customer? Where are they going to find that information? How does context influence their likelihood to complete the purchase? Where are they going for post-purchase support? What content seems to be helping? What are they searching for and not finding on your site? These are the critical questions that site search usage analytics can answer to help marketers provide a more effective content strategy.
Site search analytics allows you to dive into your visitors’ entire search journeys: queries, query refinements, associated click-through rates, and more to help you understand the users’ true intent and what is driving success.
For instance, you can quickly diagnosing your content gaps requires looking at these key analytics:
• Queries with low or no results. This means that people are searching your site for content that does not answer questions your visitors have. Prioritizing topics by the volume of queries with low or not results is a good place to start to increase content relevance. Some of these queries may be questions, like pricing for large B2B purchases, that you do not want to answer publicly on your website; that’s OK, but have a results page that points them to the correct resource, such as a phone number or email, to get their questions answered.
• Queries with results with a low click through rate. This means that people are searching your site, getting results, but the results they find just don’t resonate. By looking at these queries with low click through rates, you can analyze the further refinements and journeys of people to understand their likely intent. You can do this manually, but at scale, this is where machine learning comes in handy.
Once you start really looking into these metrics, you can start creating content that will actually resonate with your website visitors – and get off the content creation treadmill.
If you’re interested in learning more about creating a customer-centric content optimization strategy to leverage your search usage data and analytics, watch Sitecore Global Virtual Summit session with Coveo for Sitecore Product Manager Simon Langevin, “Optimization at Scale: Leveraging AI to Improve Digital Experiences”.
