Guest post by Ann Smarty.
Content marketing has changed a lot over the years. In fact, the biggest change has happened over the past three years when most websites lost from 30% to 60% of traffic.
The loss of clicks has been happening for about a decade now, driven by organic search turning into answer engines: featured snippets, “People Also Ask”, Knowledge-Graph-driven quick answers – all of those features were giving searchers quick answers they came for, removing the need for clicks.
Other organic channels, mostly social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter/X, have been focusing on keeping users on their platforms, limiting the visibility of posts containing external links. Newer platforms like TikTok and Instagram haven’t offered any opportunities for clickable links in updates.
All of those trends have been slowly but surely teaching businesses to come up with alternative visibility strategies, those that were not focusing on organic traffic.
Yet, those trends have been slow until AI-driven answers became popular enough to serve as a wake-up call. Today, buying journeys – those that used to take weeks and months of clicking – can take one minute of conversing with an AI that answers.
AI agents are running online research on consumers’ behalf, giving them a comprehensive answer that is often enough to make a buying decision.
Here’s an example of AI Mode giving a complete comparison of two well-known CRM solutions, driving an immediate buying decision based on well-defined criteria (budget, ease of use, marketing features, etc.):
As a result, web publishers across the board have seen a drastic loss of clicks.
And that is the biggest driver of a shift in strategy: Instead of focusing on traffic-driving content, businesses should start prioritizing conversion-driving content, i.e., problem-solving content.
How Can Problem-Solving Content Help Your Business Survive the 0-Click Evolution of the Web?
There are two important reasons to prioritize problem-solving content:
- People increasingly use prompts to discover products or find answers. Unlike keywords, prompts are not predictable, but they have underlying “intents” or “problems” that you can plan for and address in your content. This will increase your page’s chances of being cited in AI answers.AI comes up with complete solutions to their users’ questions. Putting your products in the problem-solving context will help AI platforms know which questions your products are good answers for, so this increases your brand’s chances of being included in AI answers.
How to create a content strategy focusing on problem-solving context:
1. Identify your target reader profile
Stop thinking in terms of keywords or keyword-matching. Keywords are still helpful for research and optimization, but your target audience should be a priority. Before you get to writing, take a few steps back and first think about who you are writing for.
- What market are you targeting?What sort of audience do you want to attract?What are their needs, wants, problems, and goals?What do you think you can offer your target readers that will make them want to listen to you, like you, and, more importantly for the long run, trust you?
Most of these answers you already know: They align with why you started your business or website. All businesses start as a response to a particular problem that a particular audience segment already has. SEO-driven content strategies used to lose this focus because keyword optimization allowed us to cast a wider net to capture more clicks from people who wouldn’t necessarily need our products.
It is time to get to the basics and focus on the people your business was started for.
For startups and ecommerce sites, this step is not much different from the product positioning stage: Where is your business in the current market, and who is it serving?
Work with your content team to explain your product positioning strategy and help them create reader profiles that they need to be serving.
Knowing your specific target audience is the most important step to understanding the problems they are solving.
You can use all kinds of prompts in ChatGPT and Gemini to help you better define your target audience personas, but always consult with the customer-facing teams (sales, customer support, etc.) to prioritize their input. No one knows your target audience better than people talking to them every day (amazingly, these teams are more often than not excluded from the content marketing strategy. This is the biggest mistake).
Searching Reddit and making notes of relevant discussed problems is also a great idea.
2. Select “DO” queries and cluster them by underlying problems
This is where keyword research comes in handy. Knowing your audience, you can make better-informed decisions as to what problems should be prioritized. But knowing your keywords gives you data as to how those problems may be worded.
Keyword optimization has been proven effective for AI visibility, time and again, at least at this point.
Look at your keyword lists in a new way. Instead of trying to group them by a common word or synonyms, group them by the problems they represent. This is where AI platforms may turn out to be very helpful. Simply upload your keyword list (from Google’s Search Console or tools like Semrush), and prompt it to categorize the list by a common underlying problem. Gemini does a great job with tasks like this.
3. Research “Fan-Out” questions
AI platforms don’t just give a direct answer to a prompt. They will often try to be more helpful. For example, if you ask AI Mode “What to see in Iceland,” it will list all kinds of options but also add tips on planning your trip around seasonality and how many days you have:
This is called a “fan-out” technique: AI platforms run multiple searches to compile them into a more useful and comprehensive answer.
Knowing these “fan-out” questions they are going to answer in their final output is useful in better understanding how to make your content more useful. I usually prompt Gemini to suggest those related questions based on my keywords. But there are also various fan-out optimization tools and extensions you can try.
4. Cite your proof
AI platforms are known to prioritize factual, clear information when looking for sources to cite.
Unless you are sharing lessons from experience, always support your statements with facts.
Readers are not so easily convinced these days— and shrewder ones may even start getting suspicious— if you simply rattle off assertion after assertion without any strong proof to back up your claims.
To become a true thought leader capable of converting readers into returning followers or buyers, back up your assertions with studies and statistics from legitimate sources. Make sure your source materials are recent.
A good rule of thumb is to stick to sources within two years of publication. Any reference older than two years is stale and possibly rendered unreliable by age, especially stats as time-sensitive as search engine algorithm updates, social media sentiment, online polls, and other fast-moving sectors.
5. Always put your products in that problem-solving context
You don’t have to be overly promotional or salesy, but this is a crucial step to driving conversions on two important levels:
- Your content is going to be AI training data, so it will help AI agents place your products in the relevant contextAs we have fewer clicks these days, we need to make sure we make the most of each one, so double up on meaningful conversion funnel optimization.
And by meaningful, I mean exactly “relevant”. Look how Home Depot is naturally optimizing its guides with their products, putting them in context and offering the ability to buy related products right from the content:
It is helpful because it removes the need to do additional research on all those mentioned tools and steps.
6. Re-focus your marketing to create a consistent digital footprint
This content strategy will also help you re-focus your whole digital strategy to create consistent context around your business and product:
- Email marketing: Your email list is a highly engaged audience. Send targeted newsletters highlighting new problem-solving content, offering a concise summary, and a clear call to action. Segment your list to ensure relevancy.Social media:
- Adjust your shares to each platform: Don’t just share links. Create engaging snippets, visuals, or short videos that directly address the problem solved by your content for platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and LinkedIn.Encourage shares: Design content formats (lists, guides, tips, tutorials) that users are likely to save or share, increasing organic reach.Engage in communities: Participate in relevant online communities (Reddit marketing, niche forums, Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups) where your target audience discusses their problems. Share your content as a helpful resource, not just a self-promotional link.Create a social media landing page that will create a natural flow from your informational shares to your content. Linkpop for Shopify is a great option for e-commerce sites.
- Blog posts into videos (YouTube, short-form for social).Long-form guides into infographics or checklists.Data-rich articles into bite-sized social media carousels.Webinars or interviews into podcasts or transcribed articles.
Conclusion
The days of relying solely on traffic are behind us. The web has evolved into an answer engine, and AI is accelerating this shift, empowering consumers to make decisions without ever clicking through to any sites. This means your content strategy needs a radical rethink.
Prioritize problem-solving content that directly addresses your audience’s needs and positions your products as the ideal solution. By understanding your target readers, structuring your content around their core problems, and integrating your products into helpful contexts, you’ll not only increase your chances of being cited by AI but also convert clicks you do receive into customers.
It’s time to stop focusing on clicks and start building focused, high-value content that truly resonates and converts.
Ann Smarty is the founder of Smarty Marketing, a boutique SEO agency based in New York, and Viral Content Bee, a social media promotion tool. Ann’s search engine optimization career began in 2010. She is the former editor-in-chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs, including Small Business Trends and Mashable.
The post How to Create Problem-Solving Content that Converts appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog | Webbiquity.
