Find Questions That Your Buyer Persona is Asking

Whenever I'm mapping out a content plan I will start by finding out what my buyer persona is asking. From there you can align the questions to topical keywords in order to drive growth, but ultimately you'll be fulfilling your potential customer's needs.

Step 1: Finding Questions Being Asked

There are a number of places that you can begin looking for questions that your buyer persona is asking. My first port of call is Quora.

If you don't know already, Quora is a social network all focused on users asking questions and then getting answers from people who have knowledge in a specific area. Using Quora you can go through and search for what people are asking, and then use this information to inform your content strategy.

The above example is one result of many from a search based around "Coffee". Other questions that were asked include:

• Is coffee with soy milk vegan?
• What are typical coffee shops' margins on the coffee and drinks they sell?
• Why should you put instant coffee and water in this order to achieve proper dissolution?
• What is it like to be a Starbucks barista?
• What is the meaning of "a cup of java"?
• Do Nespresso capsules have a beneficial effect to taste or is it just a marketing trick?

If your business operates within the coffee industry, you could use some of the above examples to find out what people who are interested in coffee are asking. This isn't limited to popular topics though; you'll find hundreds of thousands of questions on Quora covering a wide variety of topics.

Another favourite tool of mine is Answer The Public.

Answer The Public is a question-based search engine. You type in a keyword relevant to you and it will find what questions people are searching for around that term. The above example is for a search of "Marketing Automation".

It will even give you the option to download a visual map for the search query to show a range of question variations. Not only that, but it's a free tool.

The third route that I will go down is using data from internal searches within my website. You can actually get this data from within Google Analytics - here's how you can set it up.

Your internal site search data can often lead you to understanding what your users want more information around and what questions they have.

Step 2: Aligning Questions to Keywords

For each of the questions that you've found you'll want to see if there is an opportunity to align them with a keyword that could bring through organic traffic to your website.

To do this, start by dropping the question into Google Keyword Planner:

A lot of the time you won't get any meaningful levels of searches each month for your whole questions - as you can see below:

If you check out some of the suggestions below this though, you're likely to find some opportunities. You can also plug in a few variations of the question to find some search volume; for example, I could search for "cup of java" instead of "what is the meaning of a cup of java" and I'll get a number of keyword opportunities that I can align to the question.

There are a few opportunities from that search, including "cup of java", "java cup" and "java coffee" that have at least a few hundred searches each month.

Step 3: Aligning Questions to Content

Once you've got a question and a target keyword, all that needs doing now is to provide an answer in the form of a piece of content.

You can get creative here, but try to ensure that you're including your keyword within your content title as well as remaining focused on answering the specific question that your buyer persona originally had.

A few example content ideas could be:

• Tracing the roots of the 'cup of java'
• What's a 'cup of java' and why should you have one once a day?
• Coffee Basics: what does a 'cup of java' mean?

You can see where I'm going here. Once you start building out a range of questions and keywords, you can both qualify the demand for the content through search volume and validate the idea based on your persona research.