When you use content marketing you need the best blog topics that will improve your website’s SEO. But, are you having trouble figuring out what questions your target audience is asking? Are you surprised that your blog articles aren’t attracting new traffic to convert into customers?
At SMA Marketing, when we develop a content strategy for our new clients, we start by conducting research for blog topics that improve SEO. We do this by determining keywords that are relevant to their buyers. We look at their buyers’ questions and how our clients’ products or services solve their buyers’ problems to figure out the keywords their buyers are searching for online.
Creating content that answers your customers’ questions is one of the key ways you can develop a solid SEO blogging strategy. Google is becoming increasingly sophisticated at determining searchers’ intent. Creating topics and headlines that directly address the questions and concerns of your customers will allow you to take advantage of Google’s algorithm and searchers’ trend toward longer search strings.
Here’s a little secret that SEO and content marketing consultants don’t want you to know; the information you need about your buyers’ questions is readily available for free. All it takes is a little effort and knowing where to look.
When you figure out what questions your buyers or readers are asking, the process of creating an SEO-friendly blog is easy. A few tools and resources will help you generate blog topic ideas and create content that attracts buyers.
Table of Contents
Find Blog Topics That Improve SEO
Ask Your Staff What Customers Are Asking
The questions your potential customers are asking are hiding in plain sight. Start by asking your sales and customer service staff for their frequently asked questions. They are the first point of contact with your customers and know their pain points, objections, and triggers.
If you have a live chat feature on your website, you can easily collect data on customer questions by mining the live chat sessions. You’ll learn your customers’ concerns and questions directly from them, in their words. This is a goldmine of keywords and search strings.
Check Your Analytics for Keywords and Topics
Another way to discover what pain points customers are looking to solve is by reviewing your email marketing analytics. Did you have a high open-rate when promoting a specific product or service? This may indicate your customers would read a blog post containing more information about the subject.
Do you have a resource or free download that your target audience continues to engage with? Consider creating a video or blog post about how to use the resource in a more in-depth way.
Google is Your Friend
Google will tell you exactly what you want to know about your potential customers’ search queries. Use their tools to harvest the information you need.
- Google Trends ~ Enter your keyword to see if it has a high volume over time so you can create evergreen content. If you’re looking for a trendy topic, explore current trends.
- Google Suggest ~ Enter your keywords in a Google search and see what Google suggests.
- Google People Also Ask ~ This section of the SERP is below the featured snippet and gives you suggestions for related questions.
- Google Related Searches ~ Scroll to the bottom of the search engine results page (SERP) and discover related content ideas.
- YouTube – Search works the same way in YouTube. Check out this video for quick and easy ways to use Google and YouTube to find content ideas fast.
Keyword Tools
There are many ways you can use a keyword research tool to generate lists of topics that people are searching for online. Some of our favorites are:
- Google Keyword Planner ~ Log in with your AdWords account, and you can search keywords and see search volume stats and keyword ideas.
- SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool – This is our go-to for searching keywords and related terms and questions.
- Keywordtool.io ~ This tool lists topics people are searching for in Google and other search engines.
- Answer the Public ~ This tool generates a visualization of questions people are asking around a topic.
- Quora ~ When you enter a word or phrase on Quora, it will generate a list of questions that their users are asking about a particular subject. This can spark blog topic ideas, especially if you dig deeper by filtering By Type and select Questions or Topics. When you filter by Topics, you’ll see how many times questions about that topic have been asked. Choose a topic that has a high volume and you’ll hit the blog topic jackpot.
- Ahrefs– This free keyword generator tool will help you find relevant keywords from their database of over 8 billion queries. You can enter up to ten words or phrases and choose from one of six keyword ideas reports. What’s really helpful about this tool is that searches are divided between Google, Bing, YouTube, and Amazon queries.
Medium and Long Tail Keywords are Good for SEO
Medium and long-tail keywords improve your click-through rates and conversions because they answer questions from customers who are in specific stages of the buyer’s journey. It may seem counterintuitive to be very specific with your keywords and blog topics. However, when you focus on writing blog articles that answer specific questions, you will attract buyers who want what you offer.
In essence, you’re pre-qualifying your audience. You may have fewer site visitors, but those that do click through to your site will be more likely to convert into buyers. It’s better to target searchers who come to your site and convert than get lots of visitors that bounce because they aren’t really looking for your product or service.
Practice Social Listening
Social media can be a challenging space to maneuver through if you don’t know what you’re looking for. When you know where your ideal buyers hang out online social media becomes a tool you can leverage to find blog topics to improve SEO.
Join groups, like pages, and follow hashtags related to your products and services. Take time each week to see what people are saying about different subjects within your industry.
Is there a pain point you can solve? Do you have a product or service that’s better than something frustrating someone?
Rather than trying to sell them something, this is your opportunity to position yourself as an industry expert. Write a blog post explaining why you have a superior product or service and share it on those same channels.
Rather than connecting with one person, when you optimize your content correctly you have the ability to connect with everyone in the group.
Want to keep your content strategy on track? Our content calendar template helps you stay on target and on schedule. Grab your copy here.
Find SEO Topics for Your Blog
Optimizing your blog for SEO doesn’t have to be complicated. Knowing where to find blog topics that improve SEO is a key aspect of a well-rounded content marketing strategy that gets results.
Using the keyword and blog topic ideation tools we’ve suggested above will take the guesswork out of blog topic development. We challenge you to use them the next time you sit down to generate a list of blog topics for your website. Then, let us know what worked best for you. We’d love to hear your results.
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in December 2017, and has been updated with fresh content.
