With such relentless competition these days, it’s more important than ever to develop a strong web presence to engage and communicate with your customers. Content is at the heart of a well crafted digital marketing plan. Blogging still represents one of the most useful levers in any business content mix, they’re a great way to publish regular content, engage your audience and drive SEO relevance. In this post we delve into 3 tips to use keyword research to generate content topics.
Keywords are still the cornerstone of effective SEO. By finding out what people are searching for, and writing compelling content to fill in the gaps, you put your website in a strong position to help people achieve their goals, and yours. These 5 steps will ensure you find the right keywords, and thereby write the best content for your overall marketing objectives.
Before you dive into keyword research tools you will need to have some seed keywords to kick you off. These can come from a variety of places such as your products, services, brand name and common searches for your service. In this post we use a fictitious chai tea brand to help demonstrate the process. So in this instance our 2 main seed keywords will be – “Chai” and “chai tea”.
There are plenty of online tools that can help you identify relevant keywords for your website, such as:
SEMrush – A great tool and one we use alot at Relearn.No free option but a powerful all in one marketing tool set
Keyword Toolio – Very powerful and has a good free version. Gives keyword from eaby and amazon too which is great for ecommence businesses.
Google Keyword Planner – This is free but you do need to have an active Google ads account to access the tool. you dont need to bidding on keywords but you do need an open account.
answer the public – Has both a free and paid version. Another fav here at relearn as its powerful for content ideas. It uses your seed keywords and provides phrases based on common questions types such as “how to”.
Moz Keyword Explorer – If you sign up to and account you get get 10 free queries a month. One of the oldest tools out there and still very good.
Using your tool of choice pop in your seed keywords and pull together your longlist of keywords.
It’s all very well having a longlist of relevant keywords, but how do you know which ones to keep or discard?
Most of these tools will provide keywords with monthly search volumes and other helpful information. The trick is to find keywords based on relevancy, search volume and ranking difficulty. Look for keywords with a high local search volume that aren’t too competitive.
A higher search volume doesn’t always mean better. For example, if you’re a website that sells tea, targeting the keyword ‘tea’ is not an effective strategy; there are currently 2.36bn pages competing for that term, many of them powerful, authoritative websites.
Once you drill down a bit, you’ll want to compare similar keywords and decide which are better. A moderate search volume term like ‘Matcha Green Tea Powder’ might bring in more traffic but it has a higher competitive score than ‘Green Tea Online’, thus the latter represents an easier opportunity to produce content that will rank well.
Target niche keywords instead. Handily, most keyword research tools give you a difficulty meter or a score, which measures things like how strong the competing websites are, and how much content has been written already. Some keyword tools have stats depicting how many other websites are trying to rank for an exact term.
With your keyword short list sorted, you can then create topics. In other words, take a keyword and create a catchy blog title out of it. A few topic examples from our shortlist could include:
When coming up with topics, you’ll notice that many of these topic examples have some hook; they either compare two things (chai tea bags v. loose leaf tea), try to identify common problems and solve them (caffeine, weight loss, brewing chai etc.) or provide popular listicle formats (6 health benefits). Try to write captivating titles that people want to click on.
Remember to avoid keyword cannibalization too, which refers to when multiple pages of yours are competing for the same keyword. As in, if you’ve already written three posts on the benefits of chai, perhaps consolidate them into a super post, as opposed to writing a fourth post (the first part of this blog post explains keyword cannibalization really well if this is new to you).
At the end of the day, your blog should feature a combination of posts on all levels of the marketing funnel – awareness, consideration, purchase, loyalty – with an emphasis on the top-of-the-funnel, brand awareness layer.
Now your have your content topics and titles you are ready to get writing. This simple process will have given you heaps of topics to fill up your content calendars for a month or 2 at least. In future posts we will dive into tips and tricks to produce blog posts that engage your audeince and drive SEO traffic. But for now map out your new topics into a calendar and plan in the time to get them written.
Martin is founder & lead instructor at Relearn. Martin is a digital marketing specialist with over 20 years experience across inbound marketing strategy, eCommerce, digital strategy, social media, SEO, SEM and content marketing.
It has tips, how to's, some jokes (good & bad) and a wee bit of inspo. Nice.
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One Response
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