The cornerstone of inbound marketing is outstanding content. Your content must anticipate and speak to your potential customers’ pain points, questions, and interests. stellar content will naturally attract links, be shared on social media, and rank well on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

How do you create great content? It begins by creating a buyer persona (or personas) that represent your target market. Conduct the necessary research to determine common pain points, questions, and interests that real people have about your industry. You can use social media and forums to ‘listen in’ on prospective buyers.

After you’ve conducted market research, write up a buyer persona that represents a single, individual person. Give them a name, age, and gender. Write about how they spend their free time, what they do for work, and where they go online.

Next, use this buyer persona to brainstorm content ideas. Align your content with the buyer persona’s interests. With expertly crafted content for each stage of the buyer journey, that addresses the right topics, attracting inbound traffic that converts into paying customers.

Outstanding Content Fuels SEO and Local SEO Efforts

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a byproduct of great marketing. Google and search engines can be thought of as great “match-makers”. Their job is to ensure searchers find the most relevant information with as little friction as possible. Search algorithms have evolved and can easily identify attempts to game the system. Great websites act very similar to consultants. They answer questions and provide information to a visitor, positioning the business as a standout expert in their competitive landscape.

There are two aspects of SEO and local SEO: onsite and offsite.

1. Onsite SEO is all about making your website easy for search engines and visitors to understand. Your website needs to quickly guide a visitor to relevant information. The use of appropriate title tags, meta tags, meta description, headings and graphical calls-to-action will guide people deeper into your site You’ll need an easily indexable site with links between all your pages and blog posts.
2. Offsite SEO is a series of techniques that take place outside of your website and drives traffic back to it. It relies on reaching out to industry influencers, guest posts, site reviews and building backlinks.

Both aspects of SEO (onsite and offsite) are dependent on content. High quality, up to date content will attract backlinks, provide an opportunity to target new keywords and address your customer’s pain points and interests. Great content will also build and nurture relationships with prospective customers before they convert.