4 ways to use your own data for content ideas

You've all been there...everyone is telling you "content is king" (yes people are really still using this phrase after 3 years) and you're under pressure to get content onto your website, but where do you start?

Whether you need ideas for blog posts or want to improve your product page copy, there are lots of ways you could seek inspiration. But how do you know that this content is what your customers (or potential customers) are looking for and want to read?

The simple solution? Use your own data! As a site owner or marketer you've already got lots of data literally right in front of you, in the form of the trends and behaviour of your users when they interact with your website.

Here are four of the best ways that you can take this data and see exactly what content you need to produce for your customers...

Site search in Google Analytics

Often overlooked, this really handy section of Google Analytics can straight away show you what your customers are looking for when they use your site search. This obviously relies on you not only having a search functionality on your website, but also having this configured by a Google Analytics expert so you know it's tracking data correctly.

You can access site search reports in the Behaviour section of Google Analytics and then select the Search Terms report to see which the most popular things are that people are searching for.

Looking at this example snippet from the Site Search we can see that terms like 'Mercedes-Benz' and 'Land Rover Range Rover Evoque 5 Door' are by far the most popular searches (in this date range). Therefore a couple of simple content wins could be to:

• Add additional content or even rewrite those product pages
• Consider creating blog posts, guides, videos etc around these subjects to give users even more information

Popular content

Another tip using Google Analytics (or your proprietary web analytics software) is to look at specific sections of your website and see what existing content is the most popular (and potentially the most valuable in terms of conversions), then simply produce more of that.

So as an example, if you isolate just your blog pages (and look at which Landing Pages are the most popular) you can identify which content is attracting the highest amount of traffic (or conversions) and either write more blog posts or create of types of content around the same topics.

Social sharing trends 

Another type of data to consider are your social sharing stats. By seeing which content is the most shared on your website can then again lead you to create more of this.

A simple way to do this would be use a tool like Shared Count or Link Tally, however for a more in-depth analysis then I would suggest the likes of Social Crawlytics or Buzzsumo.

This example (using Buzzsumo for the website Huffingtonpost.co.uk) shows that some of the articles people want to share socially include articles about charities, the Queen and dolls with disabilities. Once you look at lots of data for articles across your site then you can start to draw out specific trends.

Another example is that we once identified that people were socially sharing our ebooks more than other content, so we simply started to produce more ebooks (and ensured we promoted them heavily on our social channels).

Comments

Seeing what your users are saying on your website can be really useful too. This could be as simple as reviewing the comments section on your blog and then interpreting any feedback you are getting.

For one client we implemented a comments box specifically on a guides section of their site and asked users to 'leave your feedback'. As a result we collected lots more frequently asked questions that we could then update the guides with to include.

Social media/customer service feedback

 And taking this idea of 'feeedback' one stage further, is to look at collating what your customers are saying, asking for and talking about in relation to your brand via your social media channels and other customer service channels (such as email enquiries or even call centre conversations).

For a client previously we carried out a project to collate all of this data from a wide range of sources, then create a content strategy to outline what content needed to either be improved or even created from scratch to match their 'intent'. 

Quick wins, but make sure you think long-term

While these tactics above are all worth doing on a regular basis, what would give you a more stable base and long-term strategic plan is to have a full content audit and strategy completed.

This will use information from some of the sources above, plus look at important areas such as search intent, trigger events, psychographic framing

At Fresh Egg we carry out content audit and content strategy pieces for a wide range of brands from various industries. We also follow up the strategy with a actionable content plan. Just shout if you would like to learn more.