Find content gaps across the customer journey with keyword groups
Search intent—the "why" behind all your customer's searches—can vary widely depending on where a customer is in their buying journey.
As a business, it’s important to meet each potential customer at their present point in their buyer's journey. To do this you need to understand keywords from your customers' perspective to make sure your site has content that addresses relevant topics throughout the customer journey. However, if your organization has a large amount of content on its website, it can be challenging to identify gaps in that content.
In Conductor, you can use keyword groups to understand for which stage in the customer journey your web property is most and least visible. With this information, you can prioritize where to spend time optimizing your content to address any gaps.
Keyword Groups
Before you begin, you'll need to create keyword groups based on the different stages in the customer journey. Common examples of stages include Exploration (such as early-stage education about a topic), Consideration (such as middle-stage comparison between solutions), and Decision (such as late-stage purchase-specific content).
As you create these keyword groups, define the specific keywords that should belong in each stage of the customer journey. We recommend basing each stage on your organization's definitions for each stage. Consider the following example:
| Keyword Group (Journey Stage) |
Search Intent | Example Keywords |
| Exploration (Early) |
Informational Commercial Investigation |
“How can I prevent blister while walking” "Best socks for preventing blisters" |
| Consideration (Mid) |
Commercial Investigation | "Nylons Socks vs Wick Moisture Socks" |
| Decision (Late) |
Navigational Transactional |
"Wick moisture Socks for sale near me" "Buy size 11 nylon socks" |
Consider also using a naming convention for your keyword groups that makes them easy to find among your other groups. For example, you can use:
- "Customer Journey: Early / Exploration"
- "Customer Journey: Mid / Consideration"
- "Customer Journey: Late / Decision"
After creating a keyword group for each stage, we can use them to evaluate performance of each keyword group associated with a customer journey stage using the Keyword Groups, Keywords, and Market Share reports.
- In Conductor, go to Keyword Groups↗️.
- Enter "Customer Journey" in the search bar above the table to filter to see the customer journey stage keyword groups you created above.
- Identify a customer journey stage keyword group for which you can prioritize your SEO efforts. You might use different metrics to decide which group to prioritize. For example, you might choose the group with:
- The highest Average Content Opportunity Score, indicating a strong opportunity for optimization.
- The lowest percentage of keywords ranking on the first page of search results, suggesting that there is room for improvement in terms of visibility.
- The lowest average rank or market share of the first page, indicating that the keyword group is not performing as well as it could be in terms of rank or market share.
- Click the keyword group you identify to go to the Keywords report, pre-filtered to show data for only that keyword group.
- Review the Keywords table to see the performance of specific keywords that belong to the group. Make a note of keywords that may be contributing to the low visibility of the group based on their performance. This can help you identify topical areas where you can make improvements to your content for this stage of the customer journey.
- Go to the Market Share↗️ report.
- From the Select Keyword Groups filter, choose each of the customer journey stage keyword groups you created.
- Review the Market Share report to see how well your website is doing across each stage of the journey compared to your competitors. Are there competitive gaps that you should fill? This can provide another way to prioritize the content to focus on optimizing.
Using the information you gathered during this workflow, create content creation or optimization briefs for your Content team. As new content is published and existing content is optimized, you can use this workflow to monitor the progress of your content across your customer journey stages.
What's next?
Associating keywords with the stages of the customer journey, and then using groups of those keywords to gain insight into your website's performance across that journey, you can help to identify gaps to fill. As you fill those gaps, you'll be meeting your customers where they are, and never missing out on building brand affinity.