Creating Valuable and Engaging Content 🙌

They often say content is king. But not just any content—it needs to be valuable, engaging, and tailored to your audience's needs. This section will dive into strategies for creating content that not only ranks well in search engines but also genuinely resonates with your visitors. From understanding your target audience to optimizing your content structure, we'll explore the key elements that make your Squarespace site's content stand out and perform well in search results.

Understand Your Target Audience:

To create valuable content, it's important to understand your target audience. Research their needs, preferences, and pain points.

The Jobs to be Done framework is a great tool understanding the underlying motivations and goals of your website audience. By utilizing this framework, you can gain insightful insights into the specific jobs your audience is trying to accomplish when visiting your website. When you have this insight into your audience, you can craft content that addresses their questions and helps them complete their desired tasks.

What is the jobs to be done framework (JTBD) you ask? Good question. Here’s a quick run down.

The Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework is a powerful approach to understanding customer behaviour and motivations. Developed by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, JTBD focuses on the idea that people "hire" products or services to accomplish specific tasks or achieve certain goals in their lives.

This framework shifts the focus from demographic characteristics to the underlying motivations and desired outcomes of your audience. In the context of SEO and content creation, JTBD helps you to:

• Identify the real reasons why people visit your website

• Understand the specific problems or goals your audience is trying to address

• Create content that directly speaks to these needs and goals

  Here’s an Example of JTBD in Action:

  Let's consider a Squarespace website for a fitness coach. Instead of focusing solely on demographic information like "women aged 25-40," the JTBD framework encourages us to think about the "jobs" these visitors are trying to accomplish:

  Job: "I want to feel confident in my body."

  Job: "I need to find a sustainable workout routine that fits my busy schedule."

  Job: "I want to understand how to eat healthily without feeling deprived."

  By identifying these jobs, the fitness coach can create content that directly addresses these needs:

  Blog post: "5 Quick, Confidence-Boosting Workouts for Busy Professionals"

  Youtube Video series: "30-Day Sustainable Fitness Challenge for Beginners"

  Free Downloadable Resource: "Balanced Nutrition: Eating Well Without Sacrificing Your Favourite Foods"

  This approach ensures that the content not only attracts the right audience but also provides real value by addressing their specific needs and goals.

  By aligning your content with the "jobs" your audience is trying to complete, you can improve relevance, engagement, and ultimately, your SEO performance. This approach allows you to create more targeted, valuable content that not only ranks well in search engines but also genuinely serves your audience's needs.

  If you can't quite define your audience, you'll want to create marketing personas. Marketing personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer and involve demographic and psychometric data. By creating buyer personas you can have a more robust understanding of your audience, the kind of search terms they might use, and the kind of content and messaging that resonates with them. I’ve provided a worksheet below, but you may want to check out this how-to guide for buyer personas - understanding your audience is a fundamental first step to creating great content and optimizing your website to meet search intent.

A crucial aspect of effective digital marketing and SEO strategy is understanding where your target audience spends their time online and what influences their decisions. This knowledge allows you to:

• Target your content more effectively

• Choose the right platforms for promotion

• Identify potential partnerships or influencer collaborations

• Tailor your messaging to resonate with your audience

SparkToro is an incredible new tool that can help you do just that. With SparkToro you can simply search a term your audience uses, and it will return a breakdown of keywords, demographics, what websites this audience visits, along with youtube channels they are likely to visit, podcasts they listen to and more.

By leveraging these insights and incorporating audience research into your content strategy, you can create content that speaks directly to your audience's interests and needs. This targeted approach not only improves your SEO performance but also increases engagement, builds trust, and ultimately drives conversions.

Provide Original and Unique Content:

Stand out from the competition by creating original and unique content that offers a fresh perspective or provides new insights. Today, especially with the introduction of AI Tools, you need to offer helpful content with a unique perspective. This will not only attract more visitors but also encourage them to stay longer on your website and engage with your content. A great place to start is to consider your own business or skill set and create content in the form of case studies, how-to guides or break down a method you personally used to see success with your own business.

Remember, creating valuable content is about empathizing with your audience and carefully considering what they are trying to achieve and the types of content that they will find valuable and the messaging that will resonate with them.

If you are struggling to effectively communicate your benefits to your audience in a way that is meaningful, make sure to go back to the basics, and get started with creating a value prop and getting clear on your why, benefits and overall positioning. While this may seem like an obvious step, it is often an overlooked one, and is a fundamental piece of creating stellar content as you continue to grow your business.

Consider Where People Are At In the Buyer’s Journey:

The buyer's journey, consisting of the stages from awareness to consideration to decision, necessitates the use of varied content types to appeal to different audience segments at different points in their journey. By carefully crafting and optimizing content, businesses can effectively resonate with their target audience and guide them towards making informed purchasing decisions.

Do Keyword Research:

Conduct keyword research to identify relevant keywords related to your niche or industry. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Moz Keyword Explorer or SEMrush, Ahrefs, and more to find keywords with high search volume and moderate competition. Remember keyword research is a piece of the puzzle, but it is not the driving force for creating content. You first want to understand audience pain points, what their intent is based on where they are in the buyer’s journey, and how you can help resolve their pain or answer their questions with high quality and helpful content.

Optimize Title Tags and Headings:

Incorporate your target keywords in title tags and headings to improve search engine visibility. However, make sure the usage of keywords is natural and does not affect the readability of your content. Optimizing Title Tags and headings isn’t about stuffing keywords, it is about letting your content shine and giving Google valuable information about the nature of your content. By appropriately optimizing title tags, headings, and alt tags for images, you give Google a more clear understanding of why your content is the best option to return to someone making a search query.