How To Create Your Website Content Blueprint Using Keyword Research

/ Website Design & Strategy / By

You Want Your Site To Be Found

We have seen it time and time again. People build websites from their perspective – living inside of their industry “bubble.” They use industry jargon to describe products and services rather than the problems and research their potential customers are searching for online.

Before you even start to build your website, it’s important to know what your site visitors are looking for online.

Think of the search engines and social media networks as roads that lead to your businesses location. If your content isn’t focussed on where people are “traveling” online, no one will even be aware that your business exists.

The content you create can be thought of as your sign. If they are traveling on the road, but your sign isn’t of interest – they aren’t going to stop.

This goal of this resource:

  1. To walk you through the steps our team takes to decide on what the pages of your website should be, based on data, not the opinions of the industry insiders (likely you in your industry). 
  2. Show you the tools we use as well as how to most effectively use them.
  3. Help you to map your discoveries out using mind mapping software so you can have a blueprint on what you’re going to build. This is important whether you’re building the site yourself, or hiring someone else to do it.
  4. Give you a high level overview of “long tail” searches, teach you how important they are, and show you how to make sure your pages are best set up to rank in the search engines when your next customer is searching Google for those long tail terms.

When you’re finished with this guide – you’ll be able to create a blueprint for your new site (or the redesign of your existing one) and have full confidence that what you’re creating will be discovered and considered valuable. Which is the first step in building confidence with your potential customers.

The Tools You’ll Need

We will be using a few different tools that we believe you will find to be valuable. Please keep in mind, that one of the ways we pay the bills is by providing you will links. With some of the links we provide, we receive a commission if you sign up. This helps us to keep this content free – and we appreciate the support. Please know that we never recommend products or services we don’t actual believe in.

SEMRush.com

Our team has been using SEMRush.com almost daily since they invented the tool. There are specific ways that we like to do research that have resulted in tremendous success, and we’ll show them to you below. If you don’t already have an account, you can sign up for one here.

Ahrefs.com

This is another tool we use. Many on our team prefer this to SEMRush because the data is a little more in depth. However, it’s also a bit more complicated. What sets this apart from SEMRush is it’s analysis of links that point to websites. It’s by far the best software available to analyze SEO rankings and discover why certain websites rank in Google – and then duplicate the process.

MindMup

If you have a Google Apps account, you can access MindMup. This is a great tool to quickly create a site map, add notes, and shift things around as you brainstorm. If your brain works more effectively with lists, you can also export the map when you’re finished to a list. We’ll be using MindMup when we show you how to organize our discoveries from our research.

There are many alternatives that may work for you as well – and many have mobile apps so you can build on your phone or tablet.

Google Sheets

We love Google sheets because of it’s sharing ability. As your exporting groups of keywords phrases during the next few steps and creating your map, you’ll want to save the keyword lists you discover in a tool that will allow you to manipulate the lists with bulk actions. This is tough to do with a text editor or word processor. Trust us, using Sheets or excel will be so much easier.

Let’s Get Set Up

We find it easiest to have a blank MindMup Document open in a web browser. On an additional screen (if you have one), have SEMRush fired up and ready to go. You’re going to be doing research in semrush and then logging your findings in the mindmup document.

 

SEMRush and Mindmup opened and ready
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The Old vs the new

Business Growth Strategies

Old Business Growth Strategies – The Marketing Team Concept

Whether a business has ten employees or ten thousand, its separate departments or divisions dictate how day-to-day business functions. When looking at profitability and growth, the focus is often the marketing department. This team holds ultimate responsibility for branding and promoting the business and its services.

Odds are, your marketing team receives a product or service concept from the design or engineering department with very little background. Their task is to promote your product or service and bundle it up in a package that the sales team can work with.

Today’s concept of the marketing team puts your product or service on a conveyor belt through each of your company’s departments. Each department receives a turn but only interacts during the hand-off. This approach to marketing teams compartmentalizes each department, breaking down the processes that create the most opportunity for growth.

The Old Way of Going to Market

The Growth Team Concept

On the surface, it might seem apparent that the marketing department and customer service department have nothing in common. One deals with promoting your business and streamlining advertising and branding. The other handles incoming business and diverts it as necessary.

However, the new growth team concept takes into consideration the commonalities between the two departments and creates ways for each to benefit the other. Letting customer service staff in on some marketing secrets helps them develop a better angle from which to approach guests. Feedback from customer service personnel can help the marketing team tailor their campaigns and zero in on specific target markets.

In the old model, marketing and customer service were steps away from one another, and likely never interacted at all. This is also true of other teams which would benefit from more overlap, including tech support, sales, and even product designers.

The marketing team concept sequesters those brilliant marketing minds away from other influential forces within your business. With each department focusing on its own role at each product stage, no one is looking at the bigger picture and considering how to best meet company needs.

What’s in a Growth Team

Involving all departments throughout the product or service development process is vital to growth. Rather than separate departments focusing on their own goals, a growth team brings all those collaborators together.

Letting each department exert its own influence allows for changes to product or service design, preventing failures due to not only engineering issues but also customer preferences. While each department has a specific contribution to the end product, bringing them all together breaks down barriers in the creative process.

Based on company consultations, here are a few key points to consider about each respective department within your organization and their strengths in a modern growth team strategy.

  • Leadership– As the main decision-makers in your organization that start the ball rolling when it comes to designing new products or rolling out new services, leaders also need to listen for feedback that can impact the success of new or existing products.
  • Engineering– When preliminary plans become a reality, engineering teams may prefer to sacrifice function for form. Marketing, sales, and tech influences can keep product development moving forward.
  • Marketing– This team’s responsibilities lie in generating leads and creating a cohesive branding package for your organization and its products, but true feedback comes from support personnel who hear directly from customers.
  • Sales– Proffering the product with its complete marketing package to customers and sealing the deal isn’t always straightforward. Sales staff need to understand the product and its nuances to promote it to customers better.
  • Tech– Tech’s responsibilities are more than resolving email glitch issues. They can have valuable input that pertains to the function of processes and products, plus connectivity solutions that make a product a referral source.
  • Support– As the main point of contact with the customer, the support or service department has the unique ability to direct customer feedback along the appropriate channels. Ensuring that those channels receive the feedback is a huge challenge in the current marketing team structure.
New Business Growth Team

How to Create a Growth Team

Keeping an open mind is the first step in creating a functional growth team that sends your profits soaring. Unconventional solutions can come from unexpected places, but hopefully, those places are your company’s department teams.

Establishing a collaborative round-table type setting where all departments have representation alters the assembly-line structure that the old marketing team was part of. Rather than piecing things together as the product concept moves along, the original concept takes on adjustments in its beginning stages.

Growth teams follow a five-stage process that groups multiple departments based on the product and customer needs at each stage. These recommendations aim to keep the right people in the know for optimal outcomes in both earning leads and closing sales.

Product/Service Design

In the initial design stages, all departments (leadership, engineering, marketing, sales, tech, and support) need to have a voice. This can avoid major errors that lead to stunted sales and complete marketing flops. Each department offers its unique perspective of the product in question and improves on it before it reaches the customer.

Awareness

Generating awareness for a product or service is a task that’s not just for the marketing team anymore. Sales and tech departments can also lend their expertise on how best to showcase products for lead generation.

Combining ad analytics with online sales support, for example, helps address defined customer groups. Integrating social media allows companies new ways to perform outreach and capture leads. Without tech and sales, marketing is aiming into a void and hoping to hit the right target.

Nurturing

The next step in generating customer interest and nudging them closer to a purchasing decision depends on the abilities of the marketing, sales, and tech teams. Feedback at this stage allows for adjustments to the marketing pitch that the team uses and the technology that generates feedback.

Tech personnel can utilize website analytics to suggest changes to marketing techniques based on client interest (or disinterest), allowing your company to modify its approach on the fly rather than after months of failure to close on a sale.

Acquisition

The moment of sale requires more than sales staff who have a way with words. Part of selling effectively involves understanding what the organization is selling, and what problems and challenges arise after the sale. Sales, marketing, support, and tech staff must communicate to decipher whether customers are satisfied or not, and why.

While sales staff might consider a successful sale a job well done, the tech department’s data and the support staff’s feedback may tell a different story. Considering all these viewpoints gives a well-rounded look at what’s happening after the sale. Plus, when a product or service itself serves as a referral source, the true measure of the product may lie in its analytics after the fact.

Support

All businesses strive to improve their processes, services, and products. The ideal way to begin this improvement is through accepting customer feedback and acting on it. This demands that support, engineering, marketing, and sales reconvene to hash out any remaining issues.

For example, support can transmit feedback to engineering, who can then make improvements to the product to customer specifications.

The Bottom Line

The modern business growth strategy concept is an adaptive approach to teamwork and department integration regardless of your industry. Transitioning to this feedback-loop strategy not only unites your company’s separate divisions into one team, but it also stands to boost your profits over time. There is some great info at Growth Hackers as well.

Here is a video that breaks this whole thing down.