Five Tips for Creating Five-Star Content that Powers Your SEO and PPC 

Working on Content Strategy? 

Need tips for creating website content like landing pages and blogs that support your SEO and PPC strategies? This blog provides five tips for writing five-star content that can positively impact your SEO and PPC results and provide your customers with a helpful user experience. We look first at user data and user intent to identify target keywords and helpful topics to drive your content strategy and create a user experience that fosters lead generation. We also provide recommendations on differentiating your business by analyzing the competition and using AI properly for content creation.   

So, what are the five tips?  

1. Get to know users by reviewing your data 
2. Identify and analyze competitor content 
3. Make content digestible for the user experience 
4. Integrate target keyword variations naturally throughout your content 
5. Use AI appropriately 

By following these tips, you can create content that ranks well, provides a great user experience, and drives quality traffic that brings in quality leads. 

Tip 1: Get to know users by reviewing your data 

Your existing user data can tell us a lot about your content needs. User intent is in form submissions and phone calls. Chances are future prospects will use the same terminology as current prospects, making tools like LOOP and CallRail vital to a robust data feedback loop that powers content and then tracks results.   

A wealth of keywords and content possibilities from a form submission seen in LOOP. 

With current prospects in mind, now put yourself in your Customers’ shoes when reviewing forms and listening to phone calls. Using LOOP, you can export your leads into an Excel document to review groups of leads and identify trends. Now pose the following questions: 

• What common materials are requested? 
• What shapes, sizes, and SKUs are needed? 
• What requirements or specs are mentioned?
• What industries are they in, and what applications do those industries require? 
• What roles do they have and what locations do they serve? 
• How are people searching when they are looking for ideal quantities?

These align with the B-SMART Method®, which highlights who your users are and their intent. Now that you’ve looked at lead trends, you should try searching your offerings and look at the process from a buyer lens to understand the search landscapes that make sense for your business. Note how your company shows, what competitors show, and if your search intent is fulfilled. This aligns with TopSpot’s Four Steps, our method of setting the right expectations and evaluating success in a simplified way.  

How would your buyer search? Note the difference between a broad search versus a B-SMART search. 

If your company shows up…

This validates your content strategy’s effectiveness. Google’s algorithm rewards content that follows the Helpful Content Updates or EEAT, which stands for Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trustworthiness. You’ve aligned with this, but there’s always room for improvement. Review your landing pages results drive-to to see if they answer potential follow-up questions that can aid in conversion. 

If showing, but ranking low…

Start with content expansion—use the resources and assets you’ve already created to add keywords and topics discovered in the data and Four Steps to create impact without starting from scratch. Landing pages are a great place to start, and you can ensure EEAT and B-SMART are in product descriptions, service pages, and even About Us content. Add videos you may have and add places for downloadable content like white papers, case studies, and other sales collateral.

If not showing up…  

It’s time for new content. Look for products, materials, and services found in your SERP and LOOP research without landing pages, or consider creating pages for the materials you carry, as well as the industries you serve and the applications for each. Don’t be afraid to get specific on solutions and technical information—this is what quality prospects are looking for.

If your data is showcasing people asking lots of specific questions or for specific instructions, it may be time to start a blog. Using what users are looking for can help inform your topics. Expand on the common questions prospects and current customers look to answer on your site or with your sales team, and take time to go in-depth into materials, processes, or your services without revealing too much to competitors. Think about things like product maintenance, scenarios of challenges and solutions offered, and industry news.

Tip 2: Identify and analyze competitor content 

We mentioned looking at what your competition is doing in the tip above, but let’s dig deeper into how to identify and analyze competitor content. Landscapes will often include things that aren’t in direct competition with your business such as definitional SERP features and big retailers like Amazon. Focus on companies offering similar products and services that your users may research during their buyers’ journey. 

Here are a few things to note in your analysis: 

• Look at the topics, formats, channels, and frequency of publication in their content strategy.  
• Assess the quality of their content—is it relevant and accurate?   
• What keywords are they targeting?  
• Look for gaps in content—these are opportunities. 

This analysis isn’t meant to be a copying exercise, but one that informs areas where you need to compete and can provide inspiration for your own original content to fill those identified gaps. 

Tip 3: Make content digestible for the user experience 

The great thing about content for digital marketing is that you’re not writing novels or hefty essays here. It’s not about word count but the quality of those words—how they help a user discover you and become a buyer. In fact, algorithms encourage content that’s easily digestible.  

When reworking and creating content, remember to use:  

• Formatting like headings, subheads, jump links, and bullets  
• Visuals like infographics, images, and videos  
• Internal links to your other content where it makes sense, like a product page upon mention  
• Make sure there’s a next step or call-to-action (CTA) such as your contact information  

Remember, everything is better in moderation. Users want format variation versus long bulleted lists or a bombardment of CTAs. A pro tip is to read your content aloud. Does it flow nicely, and would you spend time reading it? Reading aloud helps identify if your content is easily digestible and skimmable. 

A good user experience has the information they need formatted in a skimmable format.

Tip 4: Integrate target keyword variations naturally throughout your content 

On the point of a good user experience, no one wants to see a bulleted list of keywords when searching for products and services or when exploring a blog. Integrating target keywords and variations is strategic but should feel natural and not affect the content’s readability. Keep it conversational.  

Keywords are a great source of inspiration for blog content and a chance to expand your expertise and authority in your specialties. Think of those definitional answers in the landscape. A blog diving into a material, process, or service you specialize in could populate one of those features if structured in a certain way.  

Additionally, there are other ways to get keywords in via page titles, headings, meta descriptions, and alt text for images—algorithms count these behind-the-scenes keywords. 

Tip 5: Use AI appropriately 

AI is a helpful tool created to answer questions or create content based on user input, which the technology pulls from the Internet. Two things are critical to effective AI use: never copy and paste directly into your content, and the output is only as good as the input. 

Cutting and pasting is a cause for concern as AI isn’t perfect, cons include: 

• It is not programmed to spot fact from fiction 
• Can sound too authoritarian or pretentious 
• Can generate nonsensical answers 
• Can overuse certain phrases 
• Search engines are now checking for AI vs human content 

Most importantly, AI cannot ask for clarification prior to generating an answer. If it doesn’t know, it will guess and provide an answer (even an incorrect one) confidently. That’s why to use it, what you type in greatly affects what it gives you.  

B-SMART is a great basis for AI queries. All that hard work done researching keywords in the past is getting pulled into the AI today, and continuing to use B-SMART means getting pulled into AI tools tomorrow. 

A B-SMART query in Chat-GPT.

Once you have the right input, think of AI-generated items as a solid foundation, not a final product. Review to ensure it sounds conversational and verify the information provided before use. 

Remember, AI relies on human knowledge, so it cannot represent your brand better than you. 

What’s Your Takeaway?  

Thinking of your users first by reviewing data, plus identifying and analyzing competitor content, creates a data-driven strategy for content expansion and creation that boosts your SEO and PPC. Once writing, make sure content is digestible for the user experience and integrate target keyword variations naturally. Finally, using AI appropriately can help you create content efficiently.  

Contact your account team for more on these tips, or if you are not a TopSpot partner, contact the TopSpot Team to learn more.