Regularly publishing new content to your business blog is one of the most critical aspects of search engine optimization (SEO). When your business is a brick and mortar without a business blog, your website’s content is limited to only it’s internal pages. This includes your contact us page, about us page, etc. By publishing new blog posts, you will have a revolving door of new content to share on your company’s social media channels. But how can you find topics to write about related to your business?
Writer’s block. It’s a real thing. But that’s ok. The first step to content marketing is to ask yourself what are the most common and important questions your customers ask on a regular basis? Next, try to envision how they’ll go to Google and type that question directly into the search bar. Whatever you come up with should be an article title. If your business is an online business, you should focus on providing value via your content first before thinking about turning a profit.
Competitors & Authoritative News Sources
An excellent place to find topics to write about is to browse authoritative news sources in your industry. You may start with websites like Entrepreneur.com or Forbes.com since they cover a wide variety of business niches. You might also look at a competitor’s blog to see what they’re writing about. Remember, you’ll be writing the article from your own perspective so it’s ok if the topic has been written on before. Also, it’s important to eliminate all insecurity about the topics you choose to write about. As long as the topic is related to your business and the products or services you offer, publish it and move in. There is a huge correlation with the quantity of articles you have published and the amount of traffic your website will receive from Google. The same applies to your social media posts as well.
Google Search Console
If you’re a small business owner with a mature website and several blog articles already posted, you might try checking your Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools) account to see how your website is performing for certain phrases. After logging in, click your website's link on the main screen. Next, you should see the phrase “Search Traffic” on the left-hand side of the page. Click it and then click “Search Analytics” on the following page. Next, you’ll want to check the boxes at the top of the page that read “Clicks”, “Impressions”, “CTR” and “Position”. By default, Google Search Console will provide this data for the last 28 days. Adjust the date range if you would like to go back even further.
You should see a list of keywords and phrases as you scroll further down the page. This data will include
- The phrases your website is currently ranking for.
- How many clicks those phrases are generating for your website.
- Your website’s average position for those phrases in the Google search results.
- How many impressions that keyword generated in the search results the previous 28 days.
- The click-through rate (CTR) which is the ratio of how often a person clicks on your website in the search results in relation to the number of impressions. The higher your website’s click-through rate, the better.
When looking through the data, try to identify phrases that generate an abnormally large amount of impressions compared to other phrases. These are the phrases that will generate the most traffic and are the ones you’ll want to tailor your blog strategy around. This is especially true if your position is above 5 for that specific phrase because you should want to improve your position. A position ranking of 11-20 would place your website on the second page of the Google search results. What blog article titles can you think of that would use that particular phrase? As a rule of thumb, try to exceed 500 words when publishing blog articles. The more words that are required to complete an article, the more in depth the subject is and the more valuable the content will be in the eyes of Google.
Google News & Google Trends
If you’re a little more advanced with content marketing, you might try using Google Trends or BuzzSumo to find trending topics in your industry. We’ve embedded Youtube video tutorials below that demonstrate how to effectively use those two tools.
Another quick way to find trending news is to visit Google and type in keywords related to your business. After hitting search, click the word “News” at the top of Google near the “Images” button. This will provide trending news related to that keyword from a wide variety of news sources. By publishing content related to the news that is currently trending, you’ll be able to jump in and ride the trending news tidal wave and get quick traffic. At the end of the day, a topic that may seem boring to you could be informative and meaningful to someone else. Again, try to eliminate all insecurities about the content you’re publishing and focus on providing value to readers. The more value you provide to potential customers, the more leads your website will generate for your business.
Contact John Mann SEO Consulting
Are you small business owner that needs help with your company’s content marketing strategy? John Mann SEO Consulting can we help. We are an SEO company based in Nashville, Tennessee and have experience working with a wide variety of business types. To schedule your free consultation, fill out our contact form of call us directly at 615-491-9819. We’re interested in learning more about your business goals and who your targeted audience is.