The Ultimate Guide to Something Nobody Asked For

Welcome to the ultimate guide.

We haven’t quite decided what it’s the ultimate guide to yet, but that’s okay because a keyword research tool says 1,900 people a month are searching for something vaguely adjacent to it. We’ve checked the competition, the top-ranking article is 3,742 words long, so obviously ours will be 4,000.

We’ll add a table of contents, at least eleven H2s, and a section explaining what the thing is even though anybody searching for it probably already knows. There’ll be benefits, challenges, best practices, common mistakes, future trends, and an FAQ containing six slightly reworded versions of questions we’ve already answered.

Then we’ll publish it, watch the impressions arrive, and six months later somebody will ask why none of this traffic has turned into pipeline.

Welcome to content marketing.

Search data is useful. It isn’t an editorial strategy.

Before the SEO people start throwing things at me, I like search data.

Knowing what people are searching for is incredibly useful because it can show you the language your market uses, expose questions you haven’t answered, identify areas where customers need help, and occasionally reveal that nobody outside your company appears remotely interested in a subject you think is fascinating.

The problem starts when search volume stops being an input into the content strategy and becomes the content strategy.

You find a keyword with volume, so somebody decides you need an article. A competitor ranks for it, so you need a better article. Their article has 2,500 words, so yours needs 3,000. Before long, nobody is asking whether you have anything useful or interesting to contribute to the subject because the spreadsheet has already decided what gets written.

That’s how you end up manufacturing content rather than having something to say.

Nobody woke up hoping to consume your content

This is an inconvenient thing for marketers to remember, but your audience has other things to do.

They’re trying to solve problems, understand something, make decisions, explain things internally, compare options, get better at their jobs, or occasionally avoid doing their jobs for ten minutes.

If your content helps them do any of that, brilliant. If it exists because Tuesday was empty on the content calendar, they’ll probably cope without it.

Volume-driven content strategies can make production itself look like success. Four blogs went live this month, social has its required number of posts, and the quarterly ebook has been safely released into the wild.

There’s plenty of evidence that marketing has been busy.

Whether anybody needed what it produced is a slightly more awkward question.

“Ultimate” is doing an extraordinary amount of work

The internet contains an impressive number of ultimate guides, and somehow, despite having achieved this state of ultimate knowledge, we keep needing more of them.

There are absolutely times when a comprehensive resource is the right thing to create. If the subject is complicated, the audience needs depth, and you have enough expertise to produce something genuinely useful, then give it the space it deserves.

What I don’t buy is the idea that length creates authority.

Explaining something in 4,000 words when 800 would have answered the question doesn’t make the content more credible. Making someone excavate the answer from underneath six introductory sections, a history lesson, and ten benefits they didn’t ask for mostly demonstrates that their time wasn’t high on your list of priorities.

Sometimes a useful answer is a paragraph and sometimes it needs a detailed guide. The amount you publish should be determined by what it takes to answer the question properly, not by the word count of whatever currently ranks first.

Search engines aren’t your customers

Neither are answer engines, although both matter if you want your content to be found.

If you’ve created something genuinely useful and nobody can find it, you’ve rather limited its chances of being useful. So yes, understand search intent. Structure content clearly. Use language people recognise. Answer questions directly. Make the page technically accessible and give search and answer engines enough context to understand what you’ve published.

That’s all sensible.

The problem comes when optimisation starts making the content worse for the person you’re supposedly trying to help.

The machine is the route to the reader. It isn’t the reader.

The same principle applies to AEO. We should think about whether an answer engine can understand, extract, and accurately represent what we’re saying, but that doesn’t require writing every article as though its primary audience is a robot compiling a summary.

Humans still have to want to read the thing when they arrive.

Being findable and being worth finding are different jobs

A good content strategy has to do both.

There are questions people are already asking, and answering those clearly can be extremely useful. That’s exactly where search-led content earns its place.

But not every useful idea begins with an existing query.

Sometimes you need enough space to explore a complicated problem properly. Sometimes your company has a point of view worth expressing, or somebody on the team has experience that can’t be recreated by reading the first page of Google. There are also times when the most useful thing you can do is make the right customer think differently about a problem they already know they have.

All of those can be legitimate reasons to publish something.

If every editorial conversation starts by asking for the search volume, you risk filtering out quite a lot of what makes your company worth listening to in the first place.

Your subject-matter experts probably know things your keyword tool doesn’t

This is one of the biggest missed opportunities I see in B2B technology marketing.

Companies employ people who have spent years building products, responding to incidents, working with customers, solving technical problems, running programmes, making mistakes, fixing them, and gradually forming opinions based on what they’ve seen.

Marketing then asks them to contribute to “Top 10 Cybersecurity Trends to Watch”.

What a waste.

A proper conversation with those people is much more interesting. Find out what customers repeatedly misunderstand and what advice they keep having to give. Ask what has changed their mind over the years, where they disagree with accepted industry wisdom, what went spectacularly wrong once, and what they know now that they wish customers understood before buying the kind of thing you sell.

That’s where some of your best content ideas are hiding.

Search data can still play an important role. Once you understand what your experts know and what your customers care about, it can help you see where those ideas intersect with existing demand and how people describe the problems.

That’s a much healthier order of operations.

More traffic isn’t automatically better traffic

A content programme can look enormously successful while achieving remarkably little.

Traffic climbs, impressions increase, rankings improve, and the graph heads reassuringly towards the top-right corner. Meanwhile, the people arriving have almost nothing in common with the people who might ever buy from you.

That’s particularly easy in specialist B2B markets, where a broad informational keyword can attract a huge audience while only a tiny proportion of those visitors are commercially relevant.

It doesn’t make informational content worthless. It means you need to understand what job a piece of content is supposed to do.

An article might introduce your company to a relevant audience, help somebody evaluate an approach, answer a question that repeatedly appears during the buying process, establish expertise, support a sales conversation, or earn useful citations and links. An article attracting 200 of the right people can be considerably more valuable than one attracting 20,000 people who were never going to care about what you sell.

Traffic can tell you something about the performance of your content, but it isn’t the reason the content exists.

So what should we write about?

I’d start with the market rather than the keyword list.

Look at what customers are trying to achieve and where they get stuck. Pay attention to the questions that repeatedly come up in sales calls, customer conversations, product discussions, communities, and events. Look for difficult decisions, persistent confusion, and areas where your team has useful experience that isn’t already being regurgitated by every company in the category.

Then bring in search data, competitive research, performance data, and the rest of the marketing toolkit to sharpen those ideas and work out how people are looking for the answers.

Some of what comes out of that process will be designed around a valuable search query, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Other pieces might have almost no measurable search volume but express something important about your market or the way your company thinks.

The objective isn’t to avoid SEO-shaped content.

It’s to avoid producing content that has no reason to exist once you remove the keyword.

The ultimate content strategy

Sadly, there isn’t one.

What you have instead is an audience, a market, commercial objectives, useful questions, expertise, channels, formats, and a finite amount of time and money. Content strategy is deciding how those things fit together.

There will be times when the right answer is to create the most comprehensive resource you can on an important subject. Another question might deserve 600 useful words and no more. An experience or opinion might be worth publishing even if no keyword tool has given you permission first.

The important part is knowing why you’re creating it and what you want it to do.

And occasionally, the right editorial decision is to look at the keyword spreadsheet, look at the content calendar, and conclude that the world will probably survive without another ultimate guide.

Including, quite possibly, this one.