Today aXcelerate uploads the final edition of our SEO article, focusing on how a business can use SEO via Google to their advantage. We hope this feature on SEO has provided useful information to our clients and has been able to gain better insight into a vast and involved system.

The key to achieving long-term SEO goals is to find the sweet spot. A search needs to be made that, between the searcher and the business, is mutually beneficial. The searchers also need to be the right searchers. Whatever is being created should ideally show up on results pages for searches that are being made from people who are likely to be interested in the product or service a business is offering. Say, for example, that users searching for training courses are being sought. A beauty-therapy training course and a leadership management course are worlds apart, and it’s safe to assume that the searcher knows precisely which type of training course they are interested in. An intent searcher would have also included it in the query entered. Here is the number of searches for three keywords for the month of April in Queensland, Australia:

*Data gathered from Google AdWords Keyword Planner

 People searching for “training courses” will be seeking a variety of information on a variety of topics, and they will also be in a variety of states along the path-to-purchase. While the volume of people searching “leadership management” or “beauty therapy courses” is far lower, those particular queries show a lot more intent to use a service. This kind of targeting makes planning content creation much clearer, and armed with this knowledge we’ll return to the point I made previously about focusing on the should instead of the could.

This “should” is the muse to draw on in creating content and directly translates in to the question – “what can our business create that either no one else can, or no one can create as good?” The question could also be posed as – “what specifically does our business know more about than anyone else?” The answer lies in a business’s core competencies and the key to harnessing search volumes is in leveraging core competencies to create something mutually beneficial for the business and potential customers. Just as people searching for leadership management will want different things from their results than people searching for beauty therapy courses, each group will require different content strategies to increase their likelihood of converting to customers.

Figuring out precisely what content to create will take time and creativity. It does not require a large ongoing budget drain, as Blendtec showed – uniqueness will do far more for achieving high rankings. It is important to bear in mind however that content does age, people do change and consumer tastes move. A good idea will be one that lends itself to ongoing updates and reinvention. Sourcing the keyword volumes is the beginnings to any modern market research as it helps define market sizes, but, aside from this, leave the technical wizardry to Google. No one in the world is better positioned to create effective content for a business and its potential customers than that business itself – as it should be.