Sonja
If you are blogging for SEO, figuring out what to write about can be difficult. You would think that being an expert in your field would help you develop tons of successful ideas. Wrong!
Not only do you need to develop interesting topics, but you also need to learn how to write your content for SEO. After all, it doesn’t matter how incredible your content is if no one ever sees it.
Of course, you’re probably not an SEO expert, so how are you supposed to go about picking SEO blogging topics that align with the goals of your business and help you rank on Google?
In this guide, we’re diving into the nitty gritty of SEO blogging. While SEO isn’t as simple as following a step-by-step guide, it’s also not as complicated as it sounds at first blush.
First Step Of SEO Blogging: Getting To Know Your Audience
To be successful, your content needs to align with the interests of your audience. For SEO, it’s not enough to simply know who your customers are—you also need to know their motivations, what problems they’re trying to solve, and what they’re searching for within your niche.
Getting to know your audience is an ongoing process, and your target demographics may change as your company grows. Here are some of the pieces of research you’ll need to do on your audience.
Site User Demographics
You might think you know exactly who your audience is, but you might be surprised by the actual demographics of your site users. Google has a free tool called Google Analytics that can show you almost every detail you can imagine about your audience including age, location, and behavior online.
Google Trends
Yet another free tool from Google, Google Trends shows you how specific keywords rank in different locations. This is especially useful for determining which keywords from your niche will be most relevant to your particular audience.
For example, a business in California might have lots of success with a specific keyword, while a business in the same niche located in New York might not find that keyword useful. This is all due to your audience’s interests and search habits, and they aren’t universal, even within a single industry.
Direct Audience Communication
Don’t forget to try good ‘ol fashioned direct communication! Get to know your audience by engaging with them over social media, reaching out via email, or dedicating extra time to your customer service. Asking your customers what problems they want to solve, what designs they prefer, and what they are looking for in a product directly can yield some of the most actionable insights.
Researching & Choosing Keywords
If step one is to get to know your audience, step two is to research keywords. “Keywords” are literally the words or phrases that people search for when browsing the internet.
By including the right keywords on your website and in your content, you’ll become more visible to people searching for businesses in your niche. By using keywords strategically, you can target specific audiences and tailor the traffic to your site.
How To Find Keywords
While there are some super-geniuses who can do keyword research manually, we recommend using an SEO research tool! At Content Cucumber, we use SEMRush.
Start with the Keyword Magic Tool and a seed keyword—or a simple one-to-three-word description of your industry. For example, if we were looking for keywords for Content Cucumber blogs, we might start with a seed keyword like “content writing.”
What makes this tool so “magical” is the sheer number of results it yields. Often, a single seed keyword will give you more than 100,000 suggestions at a time. The Keyword Magic Tool also allows you to narrow down your results by subgroup, and exclude any keywords that aren’t relevant to your industry.
If you feel a little overwhelmed at this point, don’t stress. Think of this as an overview of the many keywords at your disposal. The next step—analysis—will help you narrow down your options.
How To Choose Keywords
Take it from someone who shies away from numbers, math, and statistics—analyzing keyword metrics is easy.
There are only two metrics you need to worry about: search volume and keyword difficulty. Just ignore the rest! I’m kidding, of course, but for the basics of SEO and as you get started, it’s okay to ignore the other metrics for the two most important.
Intent also comes into play once you are planning where to place content in your funnel. Some keywords are being searched by people looking to buy products today, while others are being searched for educational purposes.
Here’s where you’ll find this information if you happen to be using SEMRush’s Keyword Magic tool.
Search volume shows you how many times people have searched for that specific keyword in a given month. The higher the search volume, the more potential traffic.
Keyword difficulty shows you how difficult it will be for you to rank given the amount of high-ranking competition for a specific keyword. The higher the number, the stiffer the competition.
The Strategy Behind Picking Keywords
One of the most popular strategies for balancing search volume and keyword difficulty is to use “long-tail keywords.” These keywords include shorter, more popular keywords, but also include additional words to reduce keyword difficulty. As a general rule, the longer the keyword, the lower the keyword difficulty.
However, it’s important to avoid going too far with long-tail keywords. While their length can help make them more specific to your niche, they can also become too specific, reducing your chances of ranking for the shorter, more difficult keywords.
You’ll want to narrow down your options by considering factors like your site’s current authority (how well you rank currently), relevance to your current audience and marketing goals, and the type of content on your calendar.
For example, if you are working on bottom-funnel content, long-tail keywords that require more in-depth content with high-level research and linking might be more appropriate. If you are working on top-funnel content, shorter, more search volume-dense keywords will be your priority.
In the end, you should have a handful of keywords. Try not to go overboard, but don’t limit yourself, either.
Primary Keywords vs. Secondary Keywords
Once you’ve selected keywords, you should have two categories.
Primary keywords describe your business and your services and have a higher search volume. These are used to target larger audiences and are your powerhouse keywords for traffic. For optimal results, it’s best to use primary keywords in headers and titles, as anchor words for links, and in prominent positions in your content.
Secondary keywords add more detail and help to narrow down search results to reach a more niche audience. These keywords aren’t as valuable for rankings or traffic, but instead, help to demonstrate authority. They should be used in the body text of your content, and be included as naturally as possible.
Types Of Blog Content
Once you have narrowed down the keywords you plan to use in your content, it’s time to start planning. Before you can start planning topics, there are three key varieties of content you should be familiar with.
Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is content that remains relevant to your audience regardless of the season. For example, evergreen content on the Content Cucumber blog might have titles like “What is Content Mapping?” or “Do Small Businesses Need Blog Writers?”
These topics don’t need to be updated due to new information and aren’t time-sensitive in terms of publication.
Seasonal Content
Season content is very much time-sensitive and is often related to a holiday, a recent event, or news. Some examples of seasonal topics we’ve posted on the Content Cucumber blog include “50 Content Writing Statistics for 2023” and “Google’s New Update Explained.”
These topics will eventually be irrelevant once Google releases a new update, and next year in 2024. Seasonal content captures momentary attention and needs to be balanced with evergreen content so your website always has something relevant for visitors to read.
Refreshing, Recycling, & Revamping
Recycling content is a-okay in the world of SEO blogging! Next year, your writing might have improved, or you might have more details to add to a topic you covered this year. Try revamping blogs that didn’t work to see if you can make changes to help them rank, and refresh blogs that were successful to give yourself a guaranteed boost.
Content refreshes are also a nice way to give yourself a break from new content while still keeping up the momentum of your blog. Remember, consistency is important if you want to rank!
Choosing Topics
Finally, it’s time to create some blog topics! This is the part where you get to be creative and flex your knowledge of your industry. The process of choosing blog topics combines analytics, the keywords you’ve chosen, and your expertise.
Using SEO Tools For Blogging
SEO tools like SEMRush have features to help you come up with topics, and they are a real life-saver if you’re feeling stuck. Here, for example, are some ideas SEMRush created for the keyword “content writing” and the subtopic “keyword research.”
Even if you can’t find the perfect headline, tools like this can help get your creative juices flowing.
Researching The Competition
Knowing what has worked for your competition can give you a competitive edge. Not only should you keep tabs on their blog and the types of content they publish, but you should also be researching the keywords they rank for.
Note: SEMRush’s “Organic Research” tool is super useful for this. You can also use the “Keyword Gap” tool to see what keywords you might be missing out on, and where your competitors are doing better or worse in the rankings.
Going The Creative Route
Don’t underestimate just how much you have to say about your industry. Even the smallest detail of your work can be turned into a high-ranking blog. You’ll be surprised how interested your audience is in something you do without even thinking.
Try starting with some questions you had about the industry when you got started. Think about some of the common questions your customers have for you. Don’t be afraid to go microscopic—the more detail, the better!
Keeping Up With Trends
If your industry regularly has trends, or goes through seasonal phases, do your best to keep up! Participating in trends can feel a little unoriginal, but trends are sort of like keywords in that they can help put your content in front of the relevant audience.
Consult With Your Audience
If you’re trying to figure out what matters most to your audience, ask them directly! Simple tools like social media polls or email surveys can help you choose what to write about next. You might even discover entire corners of your topic you’ve never covered before.
Creating a Content Calendar For SEO Blogging
Now, it’s time to start posting! But when!?
Ultimately, you’ll find the best posting schedule and content calendar for your needs, but we do have a few basic tips to help you plan ahead and stay consistent.
Set Some Goals
SEO blogging is going to help boost your visibility, even if you don’t have a concrete plan, but that boost will only take you so far off the ground. Setting goals can help to focus your efforts, and give you a metric by which to measure your success.
For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, you know that you want to start with topics for people who know little to nothing about your brand. Basic, beginner-level content is your friend here.
During the goal-setting phase, try to set realistic expectations for content volume. You might imagine yourself posting new blogs every day, but this strategy runs the risk of quickly running out of steam. Instead, try to set a posting schedule of 1-3 times per week, depending on your writing experience and capacity.
Posting consistently every few days will help your rankings far more than posting every day for a week before taking a long pause.
Marketing Funnel Planning
One method of prioritizing content is to map your topics to your marketing funnel. For example, your top funnel content would be used to raise awareness about your brand, your products, or what problems you solve. Bottom funnel content, on the other hand, would be used to build loyalty and retain customers—this content is usually educational or higher-level.
When you are first building your blog content, we suggest starting with bottom-funnel content. Educational and in-depth content has less competition and will rank more easily. Starting with bottom-funnel content can also help to create a base of optimized blogs to give your site an authority boost before you start pushing for growth and awareness.
SEO Blogging Topic FAQ
Phew! That was a lot of SEO info, SEO blogging can be a little overwhelming. Hopefully, this guide has given you a good jumping-off point for starting your own blog, but inevitably we probably left some questions unanswered. In an effort to get ahead of this, here are just a few of the questions we imagine you might have.
What is SEO blogging?
You’d be surprised how many business owners know that they are running an SEO blog, but aren’t entirely certain what SEO blogging even is.
SEO blogging is the process of writing and publishing a blog with the specific purpose of improving your search engine rankings. By strategically using keywords and following industry trends, writing a blog can help to put your website at the top of Google search results and increase the rate of valuable visitors to your business.
How long should your blogs be?
There is some debate over how long blogs should be. In the past, the popular conception was that blog readers had relatively little patience/time for longer content, and wanted their information pared down and easy to digest.
Recently, trends show that longer pieces of pillar content followed by more in-depth shorter blogs investigating specific aspects of the main topic do more for rankings than shorter pieces alone.
Pillar content should be anywhere from 2,000–4,000 words, with subsequent blogs ranging from 1,200–2,500 words. Shorter one-off pieces like news, updates, and seasonal content should be in the 400–1,200 word range.
Why is SEO Blogging effective?
You can only fit so many keywords and bits of information on your site, and having a blog serves as a place to store the content search engine crawlers use to rank your website’s authority.
By having a blog, you can regularly work to increase your site’s authority by adding new content and capitalizing on trending keywords without making changes to your actual website. Blogging helps you keep up with the industry, rank well on Google, and retain audience attention once on your site.
Where can I find topics for SEO blogging?
We recommend using an SEO tool like SEMRush. SEMRush has a built-in feature to help you develop blog topics, and lots of keyword research tools to keep you inspired.
I also recommend the “People also ask” trick! Type a topic or keyword into Google, then scroll down to the “People also ask” section to see what else people are searching for within the same topic.
So, in this example, we might write a blog about how you can start writing your own blog. Maybe we would call it…hmmm…I dunno, “Everything You Need To Know About Picking SEO Blog Topics”? Something like that.
How long does it take to write an SEO blog post?
Your personal writing experience, speed, and skill will determine just how long it will take you to write an SEO blog post.
Remember, writing a blog isn’t just about writing the words—you have to do research, find authoritative sources to link, focus on formatting, and incorporate keywords organically.
Luckily, Content Cucumber exists! Yeah, it’s time for a shameless plug. We write your blogs so you don’t have to, and we can even do SEO research to find the right keywords and topics to help you boost your rankings.
Book a demo with the Content Cucumber team today to learn more about our writing and SEO services!
