Content planning and SEO via Answer The Public
An increasingly large part of my work as a branding, portrait and documentary photographer is supporting my freelance and solo-entrepreneur clients to explore their branding and content strategy. While it would be nice just to be able to share what we do and how passionate we are about it, we also have to be a little bit strategic in our approach.
From exploring ways to connect with your audience, to the intentional use of storytelling, to the intangible value of your brand, work or offerings, having a clear idea of who your audience are and the tools that you can use to connect with them can really help you to appeal to the people who’ll love to work with you.
The role of search engine optimisation (SEO)
SEO is all about how we structure our content to make sure that it’s useful for people who are using search engines to find products, services and information. The more visible you are to search engines, the more likely you are to be found by potential customers or clients.
In the good (or bad) old days of SEO you could rank highly on search engines just by throwing a bunch of keywords into your content. These days it’s more about making sure your content is useful to the people who are searching for it.
For example, as a photographer I could write a post that’s stuffed full of keywords like “documentary photographer”, “Birmingham photographer”, and “branding photography” but if that post doesn’t actually offer anything of value for the people who are searching for it, search engines are unlikely to priorotise it in search results.
Using Answer The Public to work out what our audience wants and needs
So how do we create content that search engines will like, without selling our soul to dry, keyword-heavy posts? In truth, I don’t actually know the answer but I do know that the advent of online tools such as Answer The Public can help us to work out what our customer might want to know so that we can answer their questions in our authentic voices.
Answer The Public transforms search query data into visually appealing, easy-to-understand visual representations. By tapping into the questions and phrases users are typing into search engines, Answer The Public can help us to identify trending topics and relevant keywords within our niches.
Step 1: Work out what Your Audience wants to know
To create useful content for your auidence, start by entering relevant keywords or topics into Answer The Public. As you can see here, I’ve entered ‘branding photography’ to see what comes back. The tool generates a comprehensive list of questions, prepositions, and comparisons related to your input. This insight can help me to work out what my audience is searching for.
Step 2: Identify Content Gaps
Once you have a list of all of the questions and topics, you can see where you might be able to fill in gaps in your existing approach. Look for questions that you haven't addressed on your website or on your social media. These gaps are a great opportunity to create valuable, targeted content that directly addresses your audience's needs.
Step 3: CrEATE AUTHENTIC and Informative Content
When you have an understanding of your audience's queries and content gaps, you can create content that stands out. Blog posts, social media content or content that you share with a mailing list can establish your expertise and improve your chances of being found online.
Step 4: Optimise for SEO
As you create content, don't forget to optimise it for search engines. I’m not a SEO expert by any means but I do gently include some keywords, make sure to utalise headings and meta descriptions and focus on other SEO strategies like internal linking and (organically obtained!) backlinks. If you want more information about SEO good practice there are a load of great, free resources online.
It’s all about the content strategy
In this digital age, we all need a bit of a content strategy to support consistent and effective online marketing. Answer The Public seems like a great tool to support us to explore user queries and craft authentic, optimised content.
If you’d like awesome photography and images to represent your brand as part of your content strategy I’d love to work with you so do get in touch.