Otuto says: “My additional insight for SEO in 2025 is how to write content for different stages of the buyer's journey.”

Different stages of the buyer's journey. So, I assume what you're saying is content has to be different for each stage of the buyer journey?

“In general, we have to prioritise different kinds of content at each of these stages.”

In terms of stages, are we talking about awareness, consideration, and the decision-making process?

“Yeah, definitely. I'll just quickly do a traditional version of what a buyer journey actually is. A buyer journey is a framework where a customer goes through phases of discovering a problem he has, that's the awareness phase. Then, researching about that problem, that's the consideration phase, and taking an action to solve that problem, that's the decision phase.

My focus on this podcast today is to write content for these 3 phases. My number 1 tip is to create a buyer persona that would help us understand the ideal target audience and their various needs.

To buttress my point, I’ve created a persona and the persona's name is David – if you don't mind. David is actually a retail manager for over 10 years in a store and he wants to switch careers to digital marketing but he actually doesn't know what digital marketing is all about. So, at this phase, David is in his awareness phase because he's asking questions like, ‘What is digital marketing?’, ‘How is digital marketing important to me?’, and ‘How can it help improve my career?’

At this point, SEO content writers should help David by writing content that's informative and educational. Content like comparison guides, comparison posts, how-to guides, etc.

After David has understood what being a digital marketer is, he comes to realise that there are various niches in digital marketing – like SEO, paid ads, social media marketing, email marketing, and conversion rates – and David becomes more confused. He decides to do more research and more evaluation of these various niches and, in doing this, he's entering his consideration phase because he's looking at questions like, ‘What niche should I change to in SEO?’ and ‘Which path of SEO should I take?’

At this point, SEO content writers should also help David understand, in-depth, what digital marketing is and understand the various niches. They should be creating content like in-depth guides and comparison posts like the difference between SEO, PPC, email marketing, and social media marketing. With this, it will help inform David to make a better decision and then it comes to that point where he decides, ‘I want to do SEO’, and that is his decision phase.

In this phase, David asks questions like, ‘What resources can I use to learn SEO?’, ‘How much does this resource cost?’, and ‘What are the things I should do to improve my skills in SEO?’ At this point, SEO content writers should hit David with content that will give him this information, like sales pages, landing pages, and impressive descriptive product description pages so that David says, ‘I am ready to take this decision.’ and clicks the ‘buy’ button for the course he wants to learn.

Shortly, I want to quickly run through the steps and the tips I have for how to write content for the buyer’s journey.”

Okay, that sounds great. Listen, just before we get to that stage, you've done a wonderful job of defining who your buyer persona is. You've explained exactly what his frustrations are, what he does, and what he wants to know, and you've articulated why, if you have a very strong buyer persona, it becomes much easier to map questions that he or she may be likely to ask at that stage in the journey.

How do you go about establishing the buyer persona to begin with, just before we move on to creating content?

“We try to ensure that we ask questions to get a picture of what the persona is. You want to understand his demography, how old he is, what he's doing, his name, and what exactly he wants to do.”

And where do you ask those questions?

Did you ask those questions to people who are visiting your website through online surveys? Do you have discussions internally within your team/within your department if you work in a company, or is there a better way to do it?

“I try a lot of strategies. I do surveys, I ask people within the company, and I still go through that research on what people are actually looking for. This helps me form a picture of the person I want to create as a persona.”

Got you, okay. So, you do research to see what people are searching for to find your web pages and that gives you an idea of what thought process they're going through, making it more likely to actually determine who that individual is.

In terms of surveys, what types of surveys are you talking about?

“We do surveys like online surveys, and we do them with existing people we already have, like customers that are interested. We send these surveys to them. Professionals will actually help us write these surveys.

We try to do both online and offline surveys.”

Okay, great. Now, you were going to go on to talk about your content creation process, weren't you?

“Okay, yes, I will get into it. So, the first step is to create the buyer persona. We are trying to understand the ideal customer and their various needs for each stage of the buyer's journey.

The second step is our keyword research. At this point, we are searching for keywords that match each of these stages. For the awareness stage, we are looking for keywords that are informative keywords. For the consideration phase, we are looking for comparative keywords and, for the decision phase, we are looking for transactional keywords. These are the keywords we should look for at each stage of the buyer’s journey.

Our next step is content types. At this point, we try to be particular about the content we write. For the awareness piece, we are writing blog posts, we are writing how-to guides, and we are writing comprehensive content to help the customer understand what you are actually saying, doing, or providing.

Then the next phase is the consideration phase. In this phase, you are writing comparison posts, you are writing case studies, and you are putting in details regarding what you already told the buyer about in the awareness phase.

Then, in the next phase, you are writing sales page content, landing page content, and doing impressive descriptions of what you are actually providing to the customer.

The next step we will be going through is, after writing our content, we ensure that we optimise it for SEO. When optimising it for SEO, you ensure that your headings, your title tags, and your meta descriptions are well-optimised to follow search engine best practices. Also, ensure, at every stage of this journey, there is a clear call to action.

Then, the next phase is to monitor and adjust your content wherever it feels necessary, and you can use tools like analytics tools and search tools to help you do this monitoring. You can get parameters like your customer engagements, your traffic, your bounce rates, your refresh rates, or click-through rates.

With these parameters, you can judge what you should change, what you should not change, what you are doing well in, what you are not doing well, or what you’re doing within the community.

Basically, that’s the summary of my additional insights for 2025.”

To go back to your keyword research and identification phase, obviously, you're looking for keywords to match the different stages of the buyer journey.

Do you use any particular software to give you a hint of the potential intent of that keyword phrase or is it quite a manual process to match keywords against different buyer journey phases?

“I try to use software like Ahrefs and Semrush to do this. When I get the keywords, I go through them manually to determine where they can actually feature in the various stages of the buyer’s journey.”

I noticed that, in your consideration phase, you were talking a lot about comparison-type content.

Are you saying that it's always worthwhile to mention competitors in that particular phase, on your website?

“Not really competitors per se, because you might have various options in your brand. If you walk into an e-commerce store for a particular product, you might have different versions of a particular product – with one that has X function or doesn't have Y function.

Just like with an iPhone, you can compare between the iPhone 15 and iPhone 16. It can be a comparison for the person to better understand which one to go for.”

How do you measure success from people consuming your content at the various stages?

It’s easy, obviously, to measure success at the decision phase because that is some kind of purchase on your website, probably, but what about awareness and consideration? How do you measure success from people consuming that type of content?

“For awareness, I actually believe that, when people come to your website, you are attracting more customers. You see people engaging more in the awareness phase.

As the traffic is increasing in that phase, you are able to measure that you get people who are funnelling into your website to actually understand this particular content.

The same is true with decision-making: more interaction with your content.”

Do you attempt to draw a line between that interaction and an ultimate purchase? Or is that too challenging because the gap tends to be too long?

“It's indeed challenging because the gap is too long.

When they get to the decision phase, now that they are really sure that they are buying, then they make that purchase. Then, we know that what was happening in the first 2 phases brought forth a good yield when they made that decision.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time focusing on what you suggest in 2025?

“I've noticed that most SEOs write for Google and write for search engines, and we forget. We always want to rank and we want to be indexed, and we forget that these customers are who we are writing for.

As much as it's very important for us to write to pass and have Google prioritise us, we must also consider the customer. They are very important people because, no matter how highly you are ranked, if the customer leaves your website, it is bad for you. We also have to put into proper consideration the customers when we are trying to write our content.

Understanding your ideal customer is important so that you can write the content because you're not actually writing for search engines; you are writing for your customers.”

You talked about keywords earlier on, but if you're just writing for customers and you're focusing on buyer personas, is it not the case that keywords aren't as important as they used to be?

“It’s the information you get from your persona that will give you the proper information on the kind of keywords you should need to write about for them.”

Otuto Umeji is a Freelance SEO Specialist, and you can find him over at OtutoUmeji.com.