Are You Using the Right Techniques to Find and Solve Your Customers’ Problems?

The highest ranking content on search engines today isn’t copy that covers the who, what and why. The days of users browsing a topic to simply learn more about it are as long gone as keyword-stuffing techniques. Millennials – and everyone else on the Internet – are searching for one thing: answers to a problem.

If you already made it that far and started gearing your website’s content to solve the problems of customers in your niche, congratulations! You’re halfway there — but there’s still some more work to do. It’s important to analyze how you’re learning about what problems customers in your market face so you can address them in your website content and in your products and/or services.

The Power of Google

Google isn’t just an awesome way to find what you’re looking for on the web. There’s a reason it’s the fastest growing and most widely used search engine – it also proves absolutely invaluable as a research tool for bloggers, authority marketers, and more. You can use Google to find out what problems your customers want answers to, making your job of providing them with those answers even easier.

Autocomplete – It’s Not Just for Lazy Typers

If you’re a blogger, finding topics that answer your readers’ most pertinent questions or solves their problems can be a challenge. Keyword research only gets you so far – it doesn’t tell you exactly what your customers are searching for. However, Google’s autocomplete feature just might.

Let’s pretend you write a blog about dog training. What do your readers want to know about training their dogs? Let’s find out:

Here we learn that “dog training collars” is a popular search term and one that people are looking for. Now, your search results may vary based on your location and not all search terms will be valuable to you. However, you can easily spot terms that would make a great blog topic.

Let’s try again with another variation of dog training and search for puppy training:

Here we can see that users are frequently searching for tips or basic guides on puppy training. Let’s go one step further and identify problems that people have with puppy training:

With this search, we can easily determine that individuals are looking for specific solutions on problems with puppy biting and potty training. These topics would make excellent blog posts or even long-form resource pages over 2,000 words.

But I Sell a Product – How Will Autocomplete Help Me?

If you aren’t a blogger and sell a product instead, you may wonder how autocomplete can help you. You can still use it to identify what your prospective customers are looking for, so you can work those key phrases into your sales page content. For example, say you sell a hair growth product for men. Let’s take a look at male baldness:

Here we can see that consumers are searching for treatments and a cure for male baldness. If you use this language and position your product as a treatment or “cure” for baldness in your copy, you’ll attract customers searching for these terms and illustrate to them how your product can solve their problem.

Google Trends – Your New Best Friend

Google Trends is quickly becoming one of the fastest ways for bloggers and product or service sellers to identify what their customers are looking for and what problems they want to solve. Let’s try some of the same searches using this unique tool.

Here we see that dog training has been a fairly consistent search term since at least 2012, or the last five years. Compare that quickly with a search on a popular actor and celebrity, Alan Rickman.

Searches for Alan Rickman peaked in January of 2016, when he passed away, and then bottomed out. By comparing this data, it’s easy to confirm that dog training is a good niche to be in compared to trending or short-lived topics since, over time, the popularity of this topic has been steady. Now, let’s dig a little deeper and find some related topics to get an idea of what people are looking for within the niche of dog training:

These trends show us that people are searching not only for obedience training, but also training classes and service dog training. One thing to note is a reappearance of the term “collar.” This reinforces the idea that blogging about or actually selling a collar designed for dog training would be a wise move.

Searching again for male baldness, we see “cure” and “treatment” pop up again as well:

Google Trends can be a powerful tool to help you identify what your customers problems or “pain points” are and how you – as a blogger or the seller of a service or product – can solve those problems.

Creating Problem-Driven Content

The goal of using these two techniques (and there are many more) to discover what customers in your niche want to know about is so you can create comprehensive content to address and ultimately solve those problems.

For example, you can write a 2,000 word blog post on the benefits of dog training, but that page is likely to have low searches and/or a high bounce rate. Why? Because most people already understand the benefits of dog training and want to know specifics. Narrow it down for them. How can a person utilize a special collar to help train their dog? What are the most commonly experienced problems with puppy potty training and their solutions?

Content that is problem-driven and offers concrete solutions that users can try right away will ultimately prove to be your most successful website content. Take this approach and apply it to any niche and you have a winning strategy to attract readers or customers who are looking for you. Use this opportunity to call them to action by presenting solutions that include your product or service.