Keeping Your Content Aligned With Changing Search Trends

Online habits are constantly changing. That’s why it is so important to understand how your audience is using new tools and finding your business in the ever-changing online ecosystem. 

At Sanctuary, we’re constantly learning more about our clients’ audiences and adjusting our strategies to reach them in the most meaningful moments. Below are some ways you and start to think about your audience and how to align your content with new online trends. 

Audience Personas

Creating audience personas is the best way to truly understand who you’re trying to reach with your content. Audience personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. They serve as guidelines to ensure you’re creating content that reaches the right people with the right message. To get started building your audience personas, you should start asking yourself questions about your ideal customers. Start with things like:

• What is their background? What are their goals and challenges?
• What are their interests and needs? 
• What incentivises them? 
• Where do they go to get information?

Answering these questions will help you to get granular about your audience and give you ideas as to what type of content you should create and how that content should be delivered. Depending on your business, you may need multiple personas to capture different types of audiences you want to reach. But don’t get carried away! Usually, two to three personas are enough to generalize your audiences into categories that can help you develop a content strategy. 

Search is Changing

As AI continues to evolve and become a part of everyday life, search trends are shifting. With tools like ChatGPT and other AI-powered search engines, users are getting more conversational with their searches and finding information in more personalized ways. Users aren’t searching with just text anymore, they’re using voice, images and even videos. They’re finding more robust answers through AI search tools, not just links to click. 

With these new trends come new challenges for presenting your audience with content. How will they find it? Is it reaching them at the right times with the right message? These are questions to as, and the answers might not always be perfectly clear. This is where your audience personas will be beneficial. Using these summaries, you can start to answer the questions around your audience’s search patterns, which will help give your content strategy some direction. 

Creating Content That Supports Search Trends

When it comes to enacting your content marketing strategy, you should refer back to your audience personas and the questions you answered about your audience. Make sure your content matches new search trends, with thoughtful answers personalized to your audience’s specific questions. You can even use AI tools yourself to help formulate ideas for content creation (see our last article for tips on how!). 

Here are some ways to optimize your content for new search trends:

• Prioritize conversational and natural language
  • Use question-focused headlines that align with topics your audience may be searching for (“How to create content that supports current search trends?”)
• Tailor your content to be discovered by multiple methods of search
  • Include visuals and voice-friendly snippets with clear, concise answers
• Design your content for AI discovery
  • AI search tools can read and understand content contextually, not based on keywords alone. Use clear headings, clean structure and focus on complete thoughts rather than just keywords

Continue to Ask Questions and Adjust Your Strategy

When you’re trying to get your audience to engage with your business, it’s important to never stay complacent. You need to continue to ask questions, adjust your strategies and stay on top of current trends. If you don’t know where to start or need help creating a content plan, reach out to the experts at Sanctuary! We’ll get you on the right track and in front of the right people.