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What Is the Buyer’s Journey? How to Create Content for Every Stage

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What Is the Buyer's Journey? How to Create Content for Every Stage

People rarely just search for whatever you sell, click on your website, and buy right away.

In fact, 71% of them start their research with a generic search. They’re reading blog posts, watching videos, consuming reviews, asking their friends, participating in communities—before they even begin to consider your product.

So unless you’re creating content that buyers are searching for early on, it’s likely that you’re not even going to be in the consideration set. But if you can appear in the early stages of the buyer’s journey, you get the opportunity to educate them and influence their decision-making.

In this post, you’ll learn the following:

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What is the buyer’s journey?

The buyer’s journey is the process a person goes through before making a purchase.

What are the stages of the buyer’s journey?

There are three stages:

  1. Awareness – The buyer realizes they have a problem. They want to understand more about it.
  2. Consideration – The buyer is looking for and comparing potential solutions to their problem.
  3. Decision – The buyer purchases a solution.
Infographic of 3 stages of buyer's journey: awareness, consideration, and decision

How to create content for the buyer’s journey

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The purpose of understanding the buyer’s journey is to create content for each stage.

Let’s look at how to do that.

Step 1. Create buyer persona(s)

A buyer persona is a “fictional person” you create who represents the common characteristics of your customer. Knowing what they’re looking for will help you create the right kind of content.

Creating a buyer persona is not a thought exercise. Unfortunately, many companies treat it as such. They identify personas based on imagination, fill up a document, and tuck it in the recesses of a Google Drive somewhere, never to be seen again.

Buyer personas need to be based on real-world evidence. So rather than sitting in a meeting room and conjuring them up, we need to get outside.

Here’s the three-step process content marketer Adrienne Barnes recommends:

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  1. Get to know your customers – Find your best customers and call them. These are the customers who knew immediately how your product worked or have been using your product without any complaints. Ask them questions about your product, what they like/dislike, the problems they have, their responsibilities, and so on. (Alternatively, you can survey them.)
  2. Organize the data – Look for patterns among the responses. You’re looking out for commonly repeated phrases, words, and remarks.
  3. Segment the audience – From the patterns you’ve gathered, you should start to see some specific audiences popping out of the data. These will be your buyer personas.

Recommended reading: How to Create the Best Buyer Persona 

Step 2. Find topics that match each stage of the buyer’s journey

Let’s illustrate this step via an example. We’ll use Billy Blogger as our buyer persona. Billy wants to build a revenue-generating blog so that he can quit his full-time job.

We’ll start by considering Billy’s potential journey, constructed from customer feedback and data:

Timeline showing potential buyer's journey of Billy. Based on the 3 aforementioned stages

Awareness

In this stage, Billy realizes he has a problem: His site is not getting enough traffic. So he searches for ways to get more traffic to his site. He learns about the various traffic acquisition methods and decides that SEO could be the solution to his problem. He begins researching and learning more about SEO.

So, if we’re creating content for this stage, we’re actually looking for topics related to:

  • Blog traffic
  • Website traffic
  • SEO

Here’s how to find more relevant topics:

  1. Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
  2. Enter those terms
  3. Go to the Matching terms report

Since the “Awareness stage” keywords are mostly informational, we’ll switch the toggle to Questions.

Matching terms report results

To find more keywords, add informational modifiers (e.g., tips, learn, resource, guide, examples, ideas) in the Include box.

Dropdown text field to add informational modifiers in Matching terms report

There are over 30,000 keywords, and not all of them are going to align with our buyer persona. So we’ll look through the list and pick out those keywords that are relevant.

For example, the topic “how to drive traffic to your website” is likely a topic Billy is searching for at this stage. And we’ve targeted that topic with a blog post.

Consideration

In this stage, Billy realizes he needs a tool to do SEO. He begins looking for the type of tools that are available. As he encounters each product, he makes comparisons (e.g., reads reviews). If there are free versions, he’ll test the different tools out.

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If we’re creating content for this stage, we’re actually looking for topics related to:

  • SEO tools.
  • Tools for each aspect of SEO (e.g., keyword research tools, link building tools).
  • Free versions of tools (e.g., free backlink checker).
  • Our brand name.
  • Our competitors’ brand names.

Here’s how to find relevant topics:

  1. Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
  2. Enter terms like “seo tools,” “ahrefs,” or “moz”
  3. Go to the Matching terms report
  4. In the Include box, add comparison modifiers (e.g., vs, versus, best, top, review, reviews)
Dropdown text field to add comparison modifiers in Matching terms report

We’ll look through the list and pick out the topics that are relevant. For example, we can see from the list that potential customers are comparing our toolset with our competitors’ (e.g., ahrefs vs semrush). Thus, we decided to create a comparison page that addresses all of these topics.

Decision

In this stage, Billy is close to buying. He’s eyeing our tool, looking at the list of features, hesitating on pricing, and taking our toolset for a spin.

If we’re creating content for this stage, we’re actually looking for topics related to our brand.

To do this, simply enter the brand name into Keywords Explorer and eyeball the list.

Matching terms report results

Now, if you’re a small brand, you may not find many keywords for your brand name. If so, take a look at your Google Search Console data for the things people are searching for that relate to your brand.

Finally, in this stage, people won’t always be using search engines to find the information they need. After all, they’ve likely decided on your brand and may simply be looking for that information on your website. Rather than focus too much on the keywords they’re searching for, look internally.

Scan your internal site search data, talk to your customer support and sales teams, and so on. Figure out what is holding the buyers back from clicking “buy” on your website. That is the content you need to create.

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”IMPORTANT”

While the process is pretty straightforward, using modifiers will usually leave many keywords on the table. Thus, it’s a good idea to look through keyword ideas that don’t contain any modifiers and consider whether they’re worth targeting.

You can do this by looking through the reports without using any modifiers.

For example, doing this shows us a few topics that we could potentially target, such as “seo course” and “seo checklist”—both of which do not contain any modifiers we’ve used thus far.

List of keywords

Recommended reading: Keyword Research: The Beginner’s Guide by Ahrefs

Step 3. Create content for each stage

Now that you have the topics for each stage of the buyer’s journey, it’s time to create content for them.

It is likely you’ll have to create different types of content for the different stages. For example, in the Awareness stage, buyers are looking for information, e.g., blog posts, videos, etc. Whereas for the Consideration stage, buyers are comparing, so they may be looking for category pages or comparison pages.

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The easiest way to figure out what kind of content you should create is to analyze the top-ranking pages for the three Cs of search intent.

1. Content type

Content types usually fall into one of five buckets: blog post, product, category, landing page, or video. For example, all the top-ranking pages for “how to increase blog traffic” are blog posts.

Google SERP of "how to increase blog traffic"

Whereas for “backlink checker,” they’re all landing pages.

Google SERP of "backlink checker"

2. Content format

This mostly applies to blog posts, which are usually how-tos, listicles, news articles, opinion pieces, or reviews. For example, the top-ranking results for “link building” are mostly guides:

Google SERP of "link building"

3. Content angle

This refers to the main selling point of the content. For example, people searching for “best SEO tools” want the results to be fresh:

Google SERP of "best seo tools"

Step 4. Add appropriate calls to action for each piece of content

If you’re creating “Awareness stage” content, it’s not useful to try and sell your product right away. After all, the buyer has only just discovered their problem and is at the stage of researching.

Instead, you should add calls to action (CTAs) that are appropriate for the next stage. (In this case, it’s Consideration.)

So, for example, rather than promote our pricing page or even the $7 trial to someone who’s just learning SEO, we can introduce our suite of free tools instead. That way, potential customers can get acquainted with what we do and how our tools work. Alternatively, we can encourage them to sign up for our newsletter to learn more about SEO.

If your content is for the Consideration stage, you may want to link to your trial or collect potential customers’ contact information so that your sales team can reach out.

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Final thoughts

While it may be presented as a linear stage model, the buyer’s journey never really works that way in real life.

Just think about your own behavior. Do you follow such a clean linear progression when buying something? Unless it’s an impulse buy, probably not. You probably bounce around each stage as you research, go about your day, hesitate, try stuff out, forget about it, research some more, etc.

While this model does ensure you’re creating content for each stage so that potential buyers can discover you, bear in mind that it is not perfect.

Any questions or comments? Let me know on Twitter.




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Content Pruning: Why It Works, and How to Do It

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Content Pruning: Why It Works, and How to Do It

Content pruning sounds pretty appealing: delete a ton of content and see your organic traffic improve. But pruning has risks (like deleting useful pages and useful backlinks), and benefits are not guaranteed: So how does pruning actually work? And when

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8 Free SEO Reporting Tools

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8 Free SEO Reporting Tools

There’s no shortage of SEO reporting tools to choose from—but what are the core tools you need to put together an SEO report?

In this article, I’ll share eight of my favorite SEO reporting tools to help you create a comprehensive SEO report for free.

Price: Free

Google Search Console, often called GSC, is one of the most widely used tools to track important SEO metrics from Google Search.

Most common reporting use case

GSC has a ton of data to dive into, but the main performance indicator SEOs look at first in GSC is Clicks on the main Overview dashboard.

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As the data is from Google, SEOs consider it to be a good barometer for tracking organic search performance. As well as clicks data, you can also track the following from the Performance report:

  • Total Impressions
  • Average CTR
  • Average Position
gsc-performance-overviewgsc-performance-overview

Tip

If you’ve signed up for AWT using Google Search Console, you can view your GSC performance data in Ahrefs by clicking “GSC Performance” from the main dashboard.

But for most SEO reporting, GSC clicks data is exported into a spreadsheet and turned into a chart to visualize year-over-year performance.

organic-traffic-graph-showing-clicks-year-over-yearorganic-traffic-graph-showing-clicks-year-over-year

Favorite feature

One of my favorite reports in GSC is the Indexing report. It’s useful for SEO reporting because you can share the indexed to non-indexed pages ratio in your SEO report.

google-search-console-indexed-pages-reportgoogle-search-console-indexed-pages-report

If the website has a lot of non-indexed pages, then it’s worth reviewing the pages to understand why they haven’t been indexed.

Price: Free

Google Looker Studio (GLS), previously known as Google Data Studio (GDS), is a free tool that helps visualize data in shareable dashboards.

Most common reporting use case

Dashboards are an important part of SEO reporting, and GLS allows you to get a total view of search performance from multiple sources through its integrations.

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Out of the box, GLS allows you to connect to many different data sources.

Such as:

  • Marketing products – Google Ads, Google Analytics, Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360
  • Consumer products – Google Sheets, YouTube, and Google Search Console
  • Databases – BigQuery, MySQL, and PostgreSQL
  • Social media platformsFacebook, Reddit, and Twitter
  • Files – CSV file upload and Google Cloud Storage

Sidenote.

If you don’t have the time to create your own report manually, Ahrefs has three Google Looker Studio connectors that can help you create automated SEO reporting for any website in a few clicks

google-looker-studio-partner-connectorsgoogle-looker-studio-partner-connectors

Here’s what a dashboard in GLS looks like:

ahrefs-seo-audit-dashboardahrefs-seo-audit-dashboard
Ahrefs Google Looker Studio integration

With this type of dashboard, you share reports that are easy to understand with clients or other stakeholders.

Favorite feature

The ability to blend and filter data from different sources, like GA and GSC, means you can get a customized overview of your total search performance, tailored to your website.

Price: Free for 500 URLs

Screaming Frog is a website crawler that helps you audit your website.

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Screaming Frog’s free version of its crawler is perfect if you want to run a quick audit on a bunch of URLs. The free version is limited to 500 URLs—making it ideal for crawling smaller websites.

screaming-frog-user-interface-screenshotscreaming-frog-user-interface-screenshot

Most common reporting use case

When it comes to reporting, the Reports menu in Screaming Frog SEO Spider has a wealth of information you can look over that covers all the technical aspects of your website, such as analyzing, redirects, canonicals, pagination, hreflang, structured data, and more.

Once you’ve crawled your site, it’s just a matter of downloading the reports you need and working out the main issues to summarize in your SEO report.

Favorite feature

Screaming Frog can pull in data from other tools, including Ahrefs, using APIs. 

If you already had access to a few SEO tools’ APIs, you could pull data from all of them directly into Screaming Frog. This is useful if you want to combine crawl data with performance data or other 3rd party tools.

screaming-frog-api-accessscreaming-frog-api-access

Even if you’ve never configured an API, connecting other tools to Screaming Frog is straightforward.

Price: Free

Ahrefs has a large selection of free SEO tools to help you at every stage of your SEO campaign, and many of these can be used to provide insights for your SEO reporting.

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when-to-use-ahrefs-free-tools-across-the-seo-process-illustrationwhen-to-use-ahrefs-free-tools-across-the-seo-process-illustration

For example, you could use our:

Most common reporting use case

One of our most popular free SEO tools is Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT), which you can use for your SEO reporting.

With AWT, you can:

  • Monitor your SEO health over time by setting up scheduled SEO audits
  • See the performance of your website
  • Check all known backlinks for your website
ahrefs-overviewahrefs-overview

Favorite feature

Of all the Ahrefs free tools, my favorite is AWT. Within it, site auditing is my favorite feature—once you’ve set it up, it’s a completely hands-free way to keep track of your website’s technical performance and monitor its health.

If you already have access to Google Search Console, it’s a no-brainer to set up a free AWT account and schedule a technical crawl of your website(s).

Price: Free

Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar is a free Chrome and Firefox extension useful for diagnosing on-page technical issues and performing quick spot checks on your website’s pages.

Most common reporting use case

For SEO reporting, it’s useful to run an on-page check on your website’s top pages to ensure there aren’t any serious on-page issues.

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ahrefs-seo-toolbar-overviewahrefs-seo-toolbar-overview

With the free version, you get the following features:

  • On-page SEO report
  • Redirect tracer with HTTP Headers
  • Outgoing links report with link highlighter and broken link checker
  • SERP positions
  • Country changer for SERP

The SEO toolbar is excellent for spot-checking issues with pages on your website. If you are not confident with inspecting the code, it can also give you valuable pointers on what elements you need to include on your pages to make them search-friendly.

If anything is wrong with the page, the toolbar highlights it, with red indicating a critical issue.

severity-highlight-ahrefs-seo-toolbarseverity-highlight-ahrefs-seo-toolbar

Favorite feature

The section I use the most frequently in the SEO toolbar is the Indexability tab. In this section, you can see whether the page can be crawled and indexed by Google.

indexability-tab-ahrefs-seo-toolbarindexability-tab-ahrefs-seo-toolbar

Although you can do this by inspecting the code manually, using the toolbar is much faster.

Price: Free

Like GSC, Google Analytics is another tool you can use to track the performance of your website, tracking sessions and conversions and much more on your website.

google-analytics-screenshotgoogle-analytics-screenshot

Most common reporting use case

GA gives you a total view of website traffic from several different sources, such as direct, social, organic, paid traffic, and more.

Favorite feature

You can create and track up to 300 events and 30 conversions with GA4. Previously, with universal analytics, you could only track 20 conversions. This makes conversion and event tracking easier within GA4.

Price: Free

Google Slides is Google’s version of Microsoft PowerPoint. If you don’t have a dashboard set up to report on your SEO performance, the next best thing is to assemble a slide deck.

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Many SEO agencies present their report through dashboard insights and PowerPoint presentations. However, if you don’t have access to PowerPoint, then Google Slides is an excellent (free) alternative.

google-slides-screenshotgoogle-slides-screenshot

Most common reporting use cases

The most common use of Google Slides is to create a monthly SEO report. If you don’t know what to include in a monthly report, use our SEO report template.

Favorite feature

One of my favorite features is the ability to share your presentation on a video chat directly from Google Slides. You can do this by clicking the camera icon in the top right.

share-video-chat-google-slidesshare-video-chat-google-slides

This is useful if you are working with remote clients and makes sharing your reports easy.

Price: Free

Google Trends allows you to view a keyword’s popularity over time in any country. The data shown is the relative popularity ratio scaled from 0-100, not the direct volume of search queries.

Most common reporting use cases

Google Trends is useful for showing how the popularity of certain searches can increase or decrease over time. If you work with a website that often has trending products, services, or news, it can be useful to illustrate this visually in your SEO report.

Google Trends makes it easy to spot seasonal trends for product categories. For example, people want to buy BBQs when the weather is sunny.

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Using Google Trends, we can see that peak demand for BBQs usually happens in June-July every year.

bbq-google-trends-graphbbq-google-trends-graph

Using this data across the last five years, we could be fairly sure when the BBQ season would start and end.

Favorite feature

Comparing two or more search terms against each other over time is one of my favorite uses of Google Trends, as it can be used to tell its own story.

google-trends-comparison-examplegoogle-trends-comparison-example

Embellishing your report with trends data allows you to gain further insights into market trends.

You can even dig into trends at a regional level if you need to.

regional-trends-via-google-trendsregional-trends-via-google-trends

Final thoughts

These free tools will help you put together the foundations for a well-rounded SEO report.

The tools you use for SEO reporting don’t always have to be expensive—even large companies use many of the free tools mentioned to create insights for their client’s SEO reports.

Got more questions? Ping me on X 🙂

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Study Reveals Potential Disruption For Brands & SEO

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Study Reveals Potential Disruption For Brands & SEO

A new study by Authoritas suggests that Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE), currently being tested with a limited group of users, could adversely impact brand visibility and organic search traffic.

These findings include:

  • When an SGE box is expanded, the top organic result drops by over 1,200 pixels on average, significantly reducing visibility.
  • 62% of SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results.
  • Ecommerce, electronics, and fashion-related searches saw the greatest disruption, though all verticals were somewhat impacted.

Adapting to generative search may require a shift in SEO strategies, focusing more on long-form content, expert insights, and multimedia formats.

As Google continues to invest in AI-powered search, the Authoritas study provides an early look at the potential challenges and opportunities ahead.

High Penetration Rate & Industry-Wide Effects

The study analyzed 2,900 brand and product-related keywords across 15 industry verticals and found that Google displays SGE results for 91.4% of all search queries.

The prevalence of SGE results indicates they impact a majority of websites across various industries.

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The research analyzed the typical composition of SGE results. On average, each SGE element contained between 10-11 links sourced from an average of four different domains.

This indicates brands may need to earn multiple links and listings within these AI-curated results to maintain visibility and traffic.

The research also suggests that larger, well-established websites like Quora and Reddit will likely perform better in SGE results than smaller websites and lesser-known brands.

Shifting Dynamics In Organic Search Results

With SGE results occupying the entire first page, websites that currently hold the top positions may experience a significant decrease in traffic and click-through rates.

When a user clicks to expand the SGE element, the study found that, on average, the #1 ranked organic result drops a sizeable 1,255 pixels down the page.

Even if a website ranks number one in organic search, it may effectively be pushed down to the second page due to the prominence of SGE results.

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New Competition From Unexpected Sources

The study revealed that SGE frequently surfaces links and content from websites that didn’t appear in the top organic rankings.

On average, only 20.1% of SGE links exactly matched a URL from the first page of Google search results.

An additional 17.9% of SGE links were from the same domains as page one results but linked to different pages. The remaining 62% of SGE links came from sources outside the top organic results.

Challenges For Brand Term Optimization & Local Search

The study reveals that SGE results for branded terms may include competitors’ websites alongside the brand’s own site, potentially leading to increased competition for brand visibility.

Laurence O’Toole, CEO and founder of Authoritas, states:

“Brands are not immune. These new types of generative results introduce more opportunities for third-party sites and even competitors to rank for your brand terms and related brand and product terms that you care about.”

Additionally, local businesses may face similar challenges, as SGE results could feature competing local brands even when users search for a specific brand in a regional context.

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Methodology & Limitations

To arrive at these insights, Authoritas analyzed a robust dataset of 2,900 search keywords across a spectrum of query types, including specific brand names, brand + generic terms, brand + product names, generic terms, and specific product names. The keywords were distributed across 15 industry verticals.

The study utilized a consistent desktop browser viewport to quantify pixel-based changes in the search results. Authoritas also developed proprietary “alignment scores” to measure the degree of overlap between traditional organic search results and the new SGE links.

While acknowledging some limitations, such as the keyword set needing to be fully representative of each vertical and the still-evolving nature of SGE, Authoritas maintains that the insights hold value in preparing brands for the new realities of an AI-powered search ecosystem.

Why We Care

The findings of the Authoritas study have implications for businesses, marketers, and SEO professionals. As Google’s SGE becomes more prevalent, it could disrupt traditional organic search rankings and traffic patterns.

Brands that have invested heavily in SEO and have achieved top rankings for key terms may find their visibility and click-through rates diminished by the prominence of SGE results.

SGE introduces new competition from unexpected sources, as most SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results. This means businesses may need to compete not only with their traditional rivals but also with a broader range of websites that gain visibility through SGE.

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As Google is a primary source of traffic and leads for many businesses, any changes to its search results can impact visibility, brand awareness, and revenue.

How This Could Help You

While the rise of SGE presents challenges, it also offers opportunities.

Taking into account what we’ve learned from the Authoritas study, here are some actionable takeaways:

  • As SGE favors in-depth, informative content, businesses may benefit from investing in comprehensive, well-researched articles and guides that provide value to users.
  • Incorporating expert quotes, interviews, and authoritative sources within your content could increase the likelihood of being featured in SGE results.
  • Enriching your content with images, videos, and other multimedia elements may help capture the attention of both users and the SGE algorithm.
  • Building a strong brand presence across multiple channels, including social media, industry forums, and relevant websites, can increase your chances of appearing in SGE.
  • Creating a trustworthy brand and managing your online reputation will be crucial, as SGE may feature competitors alongside your website.

Looking Ahead

While the long-term impact of SGE will depend on user adoption and the perceived usefulness of results, this study’s findings serve as a valuable starting point for businesses and SEO professionals.

By proactively addressing the challenges and opportunities SGE presents, you can increase your chances of success in the new search environment.


Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock

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