Tailor your SEO content strategy around your first party data

Michael says: "Look at first party data as a way to enable better content strategy for your SEO plans."

What first party data do you think is most useful to SEOs?

"It's data that comes from the customers. That could be through email marketing, email capture, etc. Right now, there is a war on third party data, all the assumptive technologies are going away due to privacy regulations and more. For your own data from your customers - the people who have signed up for newsletters, for example - you have a choice. You can either give that data away to companies like Google or Facebook, or you can hold onto that data as preciously as you possibly can. It is highly valuable. Reach out to the marketing teams, or to customer support, and find out who these people are - their names, their email addresses, or any other data that you can get on them internally. That's all within the realm of first party data."

How can you start to use first party data?

"Obviously, there are a lot of things you do in regular paid marketing when it comes to first party data, like look-alike modelling. However, I want to focus on understanding your customer. You can do that through surveys, or polls, for example. One thing that we did, that was great for content strategies, was we surveyed all our first party data to find out where the customers fit within a psychographic profile. Psychographics refers to the study of consumers based upon their psychological and cognitive attributes such as beliefs, values, thoughts, hopes and goals.

We saw that a large fraction of our customers matched a specific intent psychographic profile, that engages with certain types of content, yet we'd been spending all our time on content that's not very engaging for them. We could learn from those customers and tailor the content to what they wanted. That's what this is all about: understanding your first party data and tailoring your content around that, for the benefit of your entire SEO content strategy."

How does an SEO form a strategy based on first party data?

"A focus group is a really good strategy, especially if that group is made up of your customers. One of the psychological models that we like to use is from a book called The People Code. It basically profiles everybody into four different 'colours', and each group has certain psychographic elements to it. For example, somebody who is in the 'yellow' profile is fun-loving and looks at life through rose-coloured glasses. These profiles can have significant attributions. For somebody in the 'white' profile, who is more engineering-focussed and research-heavy, they will take a lot of time to think before they make a decision. There are four of these profiles that every human has within them.

Using this model, taking the questions and surveying your first party data, you get some knowledge of what your clients look like. You can see if they are all within a certain profile, or if they are a mix and what that mix might be. You may find that the content you've been creating has been attracting one segment, but you're missing out on people from other profiles because your content doesn't suit them. Somebody from the 'yellow' profile wants content that is appealing to them in the here-and-now, they don't want to do research and stuff their brains with too much information. Somebody in the 'white' category, however, could want to absorb as much as possible. You can create a strategy with this, by using the same topic but developing your content to suit your audience. You can design the perfect amount of content to appeal to people in the 'white' profile - the engineers that are thinking of research. You can also decide that for people who don't want all that research, you just need to present the fun facts so they can move forward. It's about understanding what these individuals look like. When you focus on first party data, you get to know your audience instead of making general assumptions.

Marketing departments, SEOs, and content writers fall into these classifications themselves, which means that often they're not thinking outside their box. You could be a very research-centric engineer, but there's probably a lot of people in your audience who are not like that. You may have a hard time writing content for different profiles. Look at your own content staff, so that they understand these different quadrants within themselves and can reach all these different audiences. Then they can develop the same content but tailored to different mindsets."

Should SEOs be publishing different forms of content, and perhaps different pages, for different audiences? If so, does that make it difficult to build one authoritative piece of content to appeal to search engines?

"It may have an influence on trying to build one piece of content for a search engine. However, things are moving as search engines are getting smarter. They want to know your content, the user intent behind it, and how relevant you are to your users. The technologies are getting faster and are starting to better understand consumer behaviour. By developing content that's tailored to a consumer mindset, especially that of your customers, there's an opportunity to leverage.

You may want to design four different pieces of content, that are all based on the same core material, for the four different behaviours. Then you can determine which one of these has the authority. It could be a majority, so you would figure out how to craft the content to appeal to all four, and then test it with your focus groups. You could produce one piece of content but introduce elements, like specific case studies, that load within it based upon which audience you are targeting. That way the content could appeal to different audiences from the same page and URL, so that search engines can see it as one piece.

There are ways around this, but it's not perfect. It's still relatively new. On the paid side, we're always targeting specific people based on their psychological mindset. SEO is a whole different ballgame because you've got authority here."

How do you measure the success of this kind of strategy?

"You can look at all the regular metrics: engagement, click-through, traffic, and ranking for some pages compared to others. You can see who progresses through the site, completes a call-to-action from a certain piece of content, or spends longer on a certain page. There's nothing specific that really stands out except when you're testing using your own data. You can get a lot of information testing on your customers with the content that you've created, perhaps even using a focus group. They could win a prize or get a discount by giving their feedback. That's a great way to get an idea of what is successful."

Does this affect how keywords should be used?

"I am an advocate for keywords, I don't think they're going away. There are opportunities to take your keywords and place them within a customer journey segment, while understanding your audience. When we do this, we look at psychological profile per persona, so we end up with four psychological profiles for each persona. Then we analyse all the keywords per persona profile and start bucketing them into segments. That can be a segment for the awareness phase of the customer journey, all the way down the different levels of intent on the customer trail. Most of the time, it doesn't change too much. There are very few words that are specific to one psychological profile. However, you can do per persona keyword segmentation and build your content strategy around that."

How often should the content marketing strategy be looked at?

"It depends on the budget. Personally, I would be doing content strategy every month, at least quarterly. That content is key to everything that you do. It's about trying to leverage your content in every way possible, create fresh content and keep your customers engaged with your brand. That's really important. When you compare an SEO content strategy with the amount that's spent on paid, the returns differential is ridiculous. Content strategy and SEO should be as important as a campaign on YouTube or other places, if not more so."

What's one thing that SEOs should be doing less of to focus more on using first party data to form their content strategy?

"Cut out what everybody else is doing. SEOs spend a lot of time on very general, very basic, content marketing, like Article of the Week or deciding whether the number one keyword should change. Stop doing as much of the traditional stuff and start thinking out of the box.

Paid marketing is really good at focusing on target audience. They usually let Google run their smart campaigns, but they're really good at finding out who their customers are and developing strategies that are super targeted. SEOs have been the reverse of that. The 'old school' mentality was to be broad and get as much traffic as you can. Things are changing now. Look at what Google's doing with FLoC - getting rid of cookies and having their browser be the data centre of everything. That is going to impact search in the future, and we've got to be prepared. They are going to be looking at your customers, and they're going to relate your customers' intent and engagement with the content that you have. First party data is how you can be ready for the future."

You can find Michael over at SEMinternational.com.