Brainstorming Content Topics For A Blog
Sharing content is the foundation of any SEO-based Content Marketing program. But finding ideas can be difficult when you’re not given the right instructions.
If you have a blog, then brainstorming content topics is crucial. It is important to know that you will come up with many drab ideas, but those that are great will rise to the top.
However, you must remember that there is always a chance that one of your dumb ideas will turn out to be a good idea when you try it out. So, it is important to brainstorm your blog content to ensure that you will not run out of topics.
When you are starting a blog, brainstorming content topics is very important to determine the best direction for the blog. If you are looking for ideas for categories that you have never covered before, then you should do keyword research to determine what your audience is searching for.
Depending on the type of business that you are running, this process can take as long as six months. It may take less than three months, but it will depend on how competitive the digital market is.
One of the best ways to brainstorm content topics is to ask your customers. You can get a lot of insight from the comments of your customers. If you have a customer support team, you can ask them what they are looking for. From there, you can come up with a list of potential topics for your blog based on what your customers want to learn about.
Similarly, if you offer a service or product, brainstorming your content topic ideas will be much more targeted. Using the keywords that people use to search for your products and services will ensure that your blog posts are highly searched.
Here, I’ll discuss seven strategies for keeping the SEO editorial calendar full of relevant articles:
- Keyword research
- Personas
- Existing content
- Company initiatives
- Industry news and updates
- Repurposed content
- Subject matter experts
1. Keyword Research
The only way to start is to conduct keyword research. The keyword research you conduct should lead to an endless stream of new pages for your site.
Using Keyword Research to create a content marketing strategy is a critical part of your content marketing strategy. It’s vital that you choose keywords that are relevant to your content, otherwise your articles will be useless. To maximize your content’s SEO potential, you need to understand how to research and target keywords.
Only when you’ve narrowed down your target keywords, can you create the foundation for a content strategy? The best content is highly relevant to the needs of your target audience, and targeted keywords can provide you with valuable ideas for content.
Even if you’re not a writer or an editor, coming up with content ideas can be a challenge. Luckily, keyword research can serve as your gold mine of ideas. In fact, you should use it as a part of your content marketing strategy to get fresh and unique content to market your business.
When researching keywords for your content marketing strategy, you should use a combination of various tools. One of these tools is Keyword Explorer. This tool is free and can give you more options to find a winning keyword phrase. It also allows you to analyze your SERP page and analyze your keyword’s competition.
Make sure to compare multiple tools to get the most accurate results. And if you’re still having trouble, consider hiring someone to help you out.
Keyword research allows you to identify what your intended customers are looking for. It can help you understand the journey of your customers, so you can design content to help them along the way.
In addition, when you study keywords, you can get an understanding of the type of content that is ranked for the keywords.
This lets you know the search engines such as Google believe to be high quality and what different websites have to say on the subject.
2. Target Audience Personas
Using a persona to describe a customer group is essential to your marketing strategy. It brings the best possible customer into focus and ensures that your marketing message and channel are targeted to these customers.
Without a proper buyer persona, your marketing budget could go to waste. For example, mismatched messaging and ad placement could be detrimental to a positive brand experience. Fortunately, there are several ways to develop a client persona.
One way to develop a strong client persona is to research your target audience. Conduct surveys and interview your prospective clients in order to get an accurate representation of their demographics.
Google trends can be an excellent source for these reports, and you can even purchase detailed customer research reports that break down your target audience by preferences, behaviors, and pain points. Once you know what kind of customers you want to attract, you can begin building your persona.
To develop your client persona, you need to look at the demographics of your target audience. For example, if you have an online pet store, you should consider the needs of cat owners versus dog owners. For the latter group, you could develop a list for both types of clients.
Whatever you do, you should narrow the scope to better serve each segment. You can use personas to engage your existing clients and create long-term profitable relationships with your clients.
Research and development of personas will help you develop content that is specifically tailored to the problems your diverse audience members have to confront. Make a list of subjects that each individual might be interested in. Then, improve the content using the keywords you want to target.
3. Existing Content
At some point or another, you’ve likely been told by someone that you require evergreen content. Content that is evergreen is able to stand the test of time. In many areas, it’s difficult to believe content that is older than a few years, but it could be the content that ranks for your website.
This is the case for all content but is especially relevant for topics that Google refers to as “your financial or personal” subjects. These are subjects that could affect a person’s health, financial stability, or any other vital aspect of their life.
Review the top-ranked pages. These are the pages that appear in the top positions on Page 1 and receive the highest traffic.
Then, determine the other pages that are ranked on the top page of Google’s search results and driving traffic.
Find the pages being ranked on Page 2 and above that are likely to be more prominent.
Find the websites that aren’t getting traffic or ranking well and are of no use or have poor quality.
For each of these categories, you’ll want to consider:
- How do you handle the content? Will it be the result of a rewrite? What will you do with duplicate content? Are you planning to mix similar topics into a more in-depth piece? Do you want to eliminate the content you don’t like?
- How to optimize content: For pages, you’d like to increase the value of, ensure that they are optimized to meet the fundamentals of on-page SEO.
4. Company Initiatives
When you’re trying to find content ideas for your blog, using company news can be a great way to achieve your goals. By publishing these stories on your blog, reporters will link back to your site, increasing your Google ranking.
Whether you’re writing about the news of a new product, a recent company acquisition, or a new partnership, your blog should fit into your overall content strategy and be arranged in an interesting way.
One of the key things to remember when using company news on your blog is to make sure your readers know what to expect. Most people who visit your website will be interested in reading about your company.
Regardless of the type of news you choose to use, it’s vital to make sure that the content fits into your marketing strategy and business plan for your blog. Your target audience will appreciate your content and will be interested in hearing more about it.
Creating an SEO-optimized news blog strategy is critical to achieving high rankings on Google. In addition to the above strategies, you should use social media to promote your articles, and you can do so using social media.
There is always a chance to have announcements from the company, an announcement about a product or service, or a brand new content section that needs to be added to the website as a result of an initiative. Keep some space in the SEO editorial calendar to accommodate these kinds of announcements and pages.
Make sure you have an 80/20 mix with 20 percent of the content you produce being focused on your company and the other 80% being useful or educational in another way. This will ensure that you’re not bombarding your readers with sales messages.
5. Industry News and Updates
The industry you work in will likely be awash with stories, trends, news, or other interesting information to cover periodically. Keep an eye out for anything new happening within your field and prepare to write about interesting subjects.
6. Repurposed Content
There’s plenty of potential in just one piece of content. Therefore, make sure that you’re taking a look at every piece of content your business is producing and think about ways you can reuse it for the purposes of your SEO program. Training videos, webinars and other video materials, eBooks, and more are able to be turned into web-based content.
If you have a top-performing content piece, you can repurpose it for new audiences, drive traffic and generate leads. In addition, repurposing your content can increase your social media engagement and improve your SEO rankings.
Repurposing your content is a great way to overcome writer’s block. You can also repurpose your content for a seasonal or timely event. For example, you can take a summer post and repurpose it for fall. You can use the same content to promote your products or services in fall or winter.
Turning a video script into a blog post and vice versa are also great examples of repurposing content.
7. Experts
There are many employees in your organization who are knowledgeable about their work. Make the effort to discover and discuss with them what subjects they could think of to share some information with your site visitors.
In particular, we recommend speaking with your customer support team or looking over support tickets for suggestions for content that will help customers with their questions. Additionally, you can also discuss the most common issues and pain points from your customers’ phrases.
Within your team of experts, there may be some who would like to participate as guest contributors to the company’s blog, whereas others may offer amazing ideas for writing about.
More Content Creation Tips
Always strive for quality. Google and other website users are evaluating how you present your website’s content. Be sure that each page has something you can take pride in. Find out: What is an Excellent Website?
Always make sure you have a technical expert as well as an editor. To improve the quality of a website ensure that you have an experienced editor. In certain situations (like technical subjects or YMYL websites) it is necessary to have an expert review or technical analysis.
Always ensure that your content is optimized. A good piece of content is only the first step, but improving it is the next step. Check your on-page SEO is spot on each and every time.
Utilize tools to keep track of and monitor your SEO calendar. A simple spreadsheet shared with others works well to keep track of the topics you’d like to write about, the topics that are in the queue, when it’s going to be published, and much more.
Conclusion
If you’re creative in the way you approach it, you can easily discover inspiration for your content. Utilize the seven steps described within this post to start getting your SEO content strategy in motion.
We develop content for many of our SEO clients. For information on our content services or help with your SEO projects, just click here or contact us today for a free quote.
