I’m in the midst of helping a client rewrite her company website. Her business had dipped, and she wanted to land more traffic from specific keywords, ones she knew were shuttling most of the business to her competitors.

For the most part, her site was a gigantic brochure, talking all about her firm, not about what her team does for people or how her services are different from others. Like many companies, she wrote the copy herself, many years ago when she first launched her website.

But now, her brochure site no longer works. Most brochure sites don’t. Customers want to know who you are, how you got there, how you can help them, and whether they can trust you. How do you demonstrate all that on your website? With content.

Developing content to attract, acquire, engage, and retain customers is called content marketing or inbound marketing by others. The concept is generating a lot of buzz in the past few years.

Businesses like HubSpot, organizations like the Content Marketing Institute, and marketing expert sites like MarketingProfs are singing its praises, because they recognize B2B customers and consumers are increasingly turning to the internet for information and solutions to their problems.

They look on the web for answers and solutions before picking up the phone, before emailing, before buying. My client understands this, so does a prospect I’m talking with, a real estate agent who knows he needs an edge when competing with homes listed on the Internet.

It wasn’t hard to figure out where we needed to start, and it’s the first place most companies transitioning away from a brochure site should start.

Define what makes you special.

Figure out what you do better or differently than your competitors — and make sure that message is clear on your website. My client has a great differentiator, but it wasn’t anywhere on her site. We started by giving her bio and the company’s philosophy page a slight makeover, emphasizing how and why her firm is different.

Anticipate questions.

When people search online, they’re usually looking to solve a problem and perhaps for a product or service that can help them. The easiest way to create content for your services pages is to think about the questions your target customer may ask and then simply answer them. That’s what I’m doing on the bulk of her services pages.

Having trouble figuring out what questions to answer? Call up a few of your best customers or have them fill out a short survey. You can also visit your competitors’ websites to see what questions they address.

Provide answers.

While question and answer pages are a good place to start, there are other ways to accomplish this kind of content without going overboard on Q&As. You could offer a case study that highlights how you helped a customer or a company backgrounder with team bios that tell your company’s story and provide insight into its culture. You might also start a blog as a way to engage customers in an ongoing conversation. Posting new information will help you get found faster, too: Google ranks sites with fresh content higher.

With my client’s permission, I’ll share pages and traffic results after a few months.

What type of content have you found best connects with your customers?em>