Focus on the insights you can gain from customer-facing teams

Kavi says: “Prioritise and fully incorporate insights from your customer-facing teams in your SEO strategy.

The wave of generative AI is fully upon us now, and it’s probably not going anywhere anytime soon. We’ve got all these tools like ChatGPT that can do amazing things, and they’re good for a lot of stuff, but they’ve also enabled the flood of generic and manipulative content that’s filling up the internet.

It’s our responsibility as SEOs and content marketers to do a better job of creating content that serves our niche audiences as well as we can.

The best way to do that is to partner with our customer-facing teams, like customer success and sales, to make sure we know our audiences as people and we’re creating content and website experiences that serve exactly what they need and are genuinely helpful.”

Why do customer-facing teams know which content is likely to be best?

“They won’t necessarily know how to translate their insights into content, that’s our job. However, they will know what our customers talk about the most, what questions they ask the most, what they’re most frustrated with, what they’re most delighted with, and all those things that we can’t really get from things like keyword research tools.

Our customer-facing teams get to know customers on a level that we, as SEOs, usually don’t. Since we can’t be in the room with the customers all the time, we can use those folks to learn vicariously what those concerns are.

These conversations should happen on a regular basis. If you’ve got this engine running as well as it possibly can, you’re meeting with your customer success team on a monthly or quarterly basis – or at the very least, reviewing data and insights that they’re able to share with you regularly.

I understand that not everyone has time to meet regularly, so establish whatever cadence you can to make sure that you’re regularly downloading those insights and using them.”

If you have a great customer service team and they offer many different suggestions, how do you prioritise what needs to be answered first?

“It can get overwhelming. They’re going to have a tonne of stuff to tell you, or at least you hope they will.

The top priorities are any frustrations that might stop the customer from moving through your funnel. Such as, if there’s a sticking point of some kind – a concern that they have with your product, something they tend to get hung up on, or an issue with your website. Maybe they can’t find the content that they need to troubleshoot the product themselves.

Anything that stops them from becoming a paying customer or using your product to its full capacity should be number 1. You want to clear out that funnel and that time to buy as much as possible.

After that, it’s just the things that they hear most often. If there’s something your customers really love about your product that your competitor doesn’t offer, you can feature the testimonial that mentions that aspect of your product. If it’s a question that gets asked over and over again, that can get sent to the top of your FAQs. It just depends on what type of information you’re getting.”

Does keyword volume ever matter?

“The type of data that you get from SEMrush or Ahrefs can help supplement the consumer-focused insights that you’re getting.

The thing about those tools and the data you get from them is that they are generic by their nature. They give you the most popular version of a response or keyword. If the keyword volume for a particular term is really high, according to a tool, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s something that your specific customers care a lot about.

You can take that data to your customer teams, but they need to verify whether that’s something that you should actually spend your time on.”

For FAQs, do you prefer answering multiple questions on the same page or having a distinct page for each question?

“It depends on the structure of that FAQ page. If it is a quick hit list of easy-to-answer questions, that’s pretty easily tackled by your standard FAQ list with drop-downs, etc.

You should consider breaking that out into individual URLs and targeting specific search terms on individual pages when the answer that you have is long enough to merit having its own page.

Obviously, you don’t want a bunch of individual FAQ pages that have really thin content on them. However, if you can build out a guide or a table of contents, or even a few paragraphs as an answer to a frequently asked question, maybe that should go on its own page. Also, maybe you should consider building out even more content surrounding that particular concern or question.”

Should you be duplicating your FAQs on different social media platforms, and answering it differently on these platforms so that your website content is unique?

“I think it is worth it. Obviously, you want to be careful about duplicating yourself too closely in too many places.

One of the things that we have to start thinking about, in this age of zero click search, is the other ways people are finding their way to your website. As SEOs, we tend to be really precious about the website itself and only want organic traffic. We don’t want anybody finding the answers that they need anywhere but the website itself.

However, considering where we are now and how the SERP is evolving, we need to let go of that notion a little bit and get more comfortable with the idea that your customer may never find their way to your website – at least not until they’re ready to convert.

Instead, they need to be able to find that answer on Reddit, on LinkedIn, or in a YouTube video. Then, if you do see that there’s a tonne of traffic coming in from those sources, or you see through other signals that there’s a lot of interaction with those sources, you can use that knowledge to write more about the topic and capitalise on that on the website as well. It’s a back and forth.”

Do you need to be building a community on less traditional platforms, and is Reddit the right sort of platform to be doing that on?

“Reddit is probably the biggest. With Reddit beating everybody in the SERPs for informational queries these days, we probably can’t beat them, so we’ve got to join them.

Whether it’s Reddit or LinkedIn or whatever platform your customers are spending their time on, it’s really important to build out your community there. Get comfortable with this idea that, while they might spend less time on the website, they’re still spending time with your brand.

We know now more than ever that brand building is really important for SEO. If that means sacrificing some of your literal website traffic for Reddit traffic, then so be it. It’s still brand awareness that can still lead to sales.”

Do you recommend using video to answer customer questions or should it mostly be text?

“I like video, and having a transcript as well is always a good idea.

If you have the data to back up the resources you need to make a video that’s actually good and people will want to watch, then that’s a good way to spend your time. If you don’t see Google prioritising video as an answer for the search query that you’re considering, then maybe it’s not the best use of your time.

If the intent is suited to video, then there’s no reason not to do that.”

Is AI getting better at producing the type of content that you’ve been talking about?

“Generative AI, like ChatGPT and Google’s AI overviews, has gotten better. That’s undeniable. The same thing has happened with image generation tools, and we can see that pretty clearly. I do think there’s an upper limit to that though.

The way the LLMs that power these tools are trained means that there is a definite upper limit. There will never be any substitute for human-generated content.

With the continued proliferation of AI-generated content all over the place, I have not yet seen stellar examples where it feels differentiated from content created by the same LLM on a different website. Unless that ceases to be true, if you want to maintain a unique brand voice that really speaks to your specific customers and takes things like institutional knowledge into account, there’s no match for sitting down, getting your hands dirty, and doing it yourself.

That being said, tools like ChatGPT are great for outlining, researching, and getting the juices flowing. However, if you want to do it right, that finishing touch needs to be human.”

Can you use video of experts, connected to your brand, to demonstrate human expertise to Google and show that your content is not generic?

“If you’ve got the resources to do that, that’s a great idea. I love the personal touch, wherever it can be added in. Especially if you’re in a YMYL industry, that human touch is so important for acquiring and maintaining trust from Google – and from your customers.

If I read a piece of content written by a nutritionist and I’m not sure whether to take it seriously or not, if that nutritionist is on video talking to me directly, I’m way more likely to think that they’re trustworthy and that they actually generated that answer, rather than ChatGPT or a ghostwriter.

Show your face, show your name, show your credentials – anything that can lend that authority.”

Do brands ever push back because there’s no obvious search volume for these customer-focused queries?

“Absolutely. I work in an agency, and we definitely get that pushback. Whether it’s a client or your boss, there’s a balance you can strike. It’s not either or. You don’t have to totally eschew those high search volume keyword targets. You can keep those in your strategy too, but make sure you’re also covering the stuff that you’ve gained through insights from the customer team.

You can target more than one phrase with a single piece of content. There’s a way to incorporate both, and you don’t necessarily have to say to the client that they’re wrong. You can just say, ‘Okay, we’re definitely paying attention to search volume and we’re going to try to get as many of the right eyeballs on this piece of content as we can.’

It’s not always just about getting the biggest audience, it’s about getting the right audience too. If you can tell them that you’re going to do both and take the customer-focused insights into account as well, when they see the return from that, it’s going to be hard for them to argue with you.”

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

“Ditch your traditional keyword research process, if you are absolutely strapped for time.

I’d be interested to see someone write an entire content library without having done a single bit of traditional keyword research, just basing it on insights from customers. I’m not suggesting anybody actually do that, but you can use keyword research tools as a supplement to real-life human content insights.

If you’re running short on time, err towards the side of the human insights and spend less time in the tools. It’s really easy for us to rely too heavily on those tools, and they’re time-consuming to use.”

Kavi Kardos is Director of Organic Growth at KlientBoost, and you can find her over at KaviKardos.com.