How to Use Customer Insights to Supercharge Your SEO

At a very basic level, SEO is about helping your users to find the right content at the right time. If you’re only relying on third-party data to guide your SEO strategy – Google Trends, Keyword Planner and the like, then you’re probably missing a trick; the actual voice of your consumers.

Customer Questions Give You Great FAQs and Content Ideas

Whether via phone, email or live chat, customers that reach out with queries are literally telling you what they’re searching for. Its worth creating a regular feedback loop with the relevant team to mine this data for common questions, and turn them into FAQs, how-to-guides or blog posts.

The queries that come in are likely to be along the lines of ‘how do I do X’ or ‘what are the dimensions of Y’, and you’ll probably see patterns and commonalities that show you where the big gaps are in your content. Hopefully, as you update your web content and answer these questions, the rate of customer contact to your business should reduce too as customers are more able to troubleshoot on their own.

Customer Queries Reflect The Way Consumers Really Talk

With Google increasingly prioritising natural-language content (think of the type of queries that are answered by AI Overviews), customer insights are a great way to naturally align with this emerging trend in SEO. By looking at your feedback forms, surveys, testimonials etc, you’ll be able to pick up on the way that consumers talk about your products and services.

As marketers, especially if we’ve worked within an industry for a while, we can forget how real people talk about our products. Think about the difference between calling something a ‘vacuum cleaner’ and a ‘hoover’ for example, or even how we might say ‘search the internet’ vs ‘google’ – these little differences in language use can make a big impact when it comes to your SEO, as you’ll start producing content that sounds like your consumers do.

They Can Help You Create Personas That Include Search Behaviour

You might already have buyer personas in place, but consumer insights let you go beyond the usual age / gender / location metrics and start to build content around the sorts of questions people ask at different stages of their journey, and the channels that they ask them on.

They can also give you insight into things like the content formats that consumers prefer – text, video etc – which helps to inform where you should be investing your budget when it comes to content creation.

Tailoring your content around real user intent – not assumptions – can make your SEO more effective and your content more engaging.

Site Search Is a Consumer Insight

One thing you probably have access to without linking up with other teams is your website’s site search. This can be a goldmine of pain points and missing content. Are people searching for things that don’t exist, for example, or are they using different terms to the ones that you do? Are they searching for something that you think should be obviously accessible via the main menu?

Search bar insights can provide not only content ideas, but reveal UX issues and help you to optimise your site’s user journey.

Prioritise Content That Solves Real Problems

In SEO it’s tempting to chase vanity keywords, but the real value often comes from solving actual consumer problems through long-tail searches.

If consumers or potential consumers are confused, frustrated or even just curious about something – and you’re the one to answer their question, you’ve won. That’s why consumer insights aren’t just useful for lower-funnel traffic – they can be a great way to aid in brand-building and authority too.

If you aren’t looking at your consumer insights already, hopefully we’ve given you a good enough reason to start. If you’d like to talk keyword research and content planning, and how to really make a difference with your SEO strategy, get in touch.