What type of online content should I add to my site? Top 3 ways to find out what your customer reads.

With the growth of digital marketing and Google's recent update to filter poor quality or duplicated content with the Panda algorithm; your business's online content will prove to be a vital, if not the most vital tool on your SEO battlefield. We all know by now that extensive, well written content will improve rankings - but how do you know what type of content to produce? Creating content for the sake of it is not a healthy strategy and could end up costing you time and money.

Finding out what style and topic of content isn't simple - but there are few factors to consider to help understand your audience and which of them you should be targeting.

1) Analyse your search results

As a business owner, there's no doubt that you understand your customer base, but do you understand what they search for online? Even if you have a great idea for your website's content, it's important to find out what your target audience likes to read and how they'll be using those keywords and topics in their search.

Investigate titles and key phrases yourself: does your topic feature more on blogs, whitepaper or product and solutions pages? Create your content according to its preferred medium and this should help improve your search engine visibility.

2) Understand existing content

Google Analytics can help you better understand which content is currently working or not working on your website; Analytics allows you to identify how customers interact with your site and what they see before making a purchase.

Using the conversion funnels or behaviour flow tool means you can learn how visitors are moving around your site and where they leave, giving greater insight into what works and doesn't. For example, if a specific page has a higher drop off rate than any other - it's clear you need to look deeper into the page layout and it's visible content to establish why.

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3) What does your customer need?

Talking to your customers is one of the best ways to establish what they want from your site or its content. This doesn't always mean physically contacting all of your customers - whilst this would still be beneficial - most businesses can gauge the level of customer satisfaction and how valued they feel through tailored customer surveys.

Online surveys are a great way to gain quick and simple knowledge of your customer satisfaction. Companies like SurveyMonkey and KISSmetrics allow you to create tailored direct email surveys and on-site polls for your customers to complete sending you real-time results for you to act upon.