The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
If your website is like most others, there is likely a mismatch between the content you provide, and what your prospective customers search for on Google.
This article is about understanding your potential customers and their conversation with Google by using the customer journey mapping method to provide them with the best content. The idea came to me when watching internal user experience teams at our agency, and I hope it will inspire you as an SEO to leave your spreadsheets for a moment and start working with sticky notes (yeah, sticky notes).
Later in the article, as an example of the method, I will show you how a Danish insurance firm managed to come out of nowhere and dominate the conversation for a strategically important insurance product.
I have built +100 customer journey maps over the last year, so I am excited to share my knowledge with you.
I will come back to this later, but let's get a few definitions in place first:
What is a customer journey?
The customer journey is a model, which describes the stages a prospective customer goes through in order to convert to your solution. It is a way for us as marketers to understand what challenges a user confronts during their journey. When we understand it, we know how our marketing efforts should show up at every stage.
There are many different customer journey models, but I prefer the classic AIDA model, adding the Loyalty stage at the end.
Here is a description of the five stages with examples of typical Google queries:
Awareness: The prospects realize that they have a problem or