Leveraging Keyword Research to Generate Targeted Content Topics

Content is a key piece of any search engine optimization strategy. High quality, readable content helps build your website authority and will drive more traffic to your site.

There are multiple ways to generate content, some are more effective strategies than others.

New Content Generation Strategy

You will learn how to generate blog post content that would be housed on a service provider’s general blog.

A typical strategy used in blog post content generation is to create content periodically around business processes, in-the-news pieces or general business related information.

It does accomplish the following:
•   Provides unique content for the blog / website
•   Updates the blog on a regular basis
•   Will pick-up random searches organically

It doesn’t accomplish the following:
•   Drive targeted traffic to the website
•   Drive more inquiries on business services provided

This type of strategy is extremely common. “Hey, we need to get some content on the blog”. Not sure where to start, you simply look at industry related news or internal efforts and start there. Note that this type of starting point is not bad and will get the blog moving. But, not having a defined strategy will leave your blog thin, lacking followers and ultimately not achieving its true potential.

Leveraging Keyword Research to Generate a Good Content Strategy

A sound blog content strategy has objectives set. For this conversation, the objective is to produce more website traffic via business services related searches. The second objective is to increase lead generation from organic traffic.

To accomplish this, we want to leverage keyword research to help inform our content topic generation. A tool that works great is the Google AdWords Keyword Planner. You need to have an AdWords account to use this tool, which is otherwise free. (See screenshot below)

The objective with using the Keyword Planner tool is to look for longer tail keyword phrases that users search for that pertain or tie back to your main objectives and your business. This type of effort relies on data provided by Google that reflects estimated search volumes monthly for a keyword phrase. It is important to note that this data is sampled and probably not 100% accurate.

TIP: After adding your starting keyword phrase into the “product or service” field a list of related keyword phrases will come back with estimated search data on Google. Scroll to the bottom of the results and page to the last set of results using the highlighted button (see below). This will show you more obscure keyword phrases that users search for. Then, start paging backwards through these, looking for potential blog post topics.

Completing the keyword research for “neck ties” as a base keyword phrase, we generate the following data.

Here are a few examples:

•   There were lots of keyword phrases containing a tie type pocket square combination. Great insight for providing the actual product, but it also tells me I could gear blog posts around these types of sets; how to craft these sets, the benefits of a tie square combo, etc.
•   There were a lot of searches around previous year(s). Users are trying to understand what was hot or in style in the past. This is a great blog post opportunity. You could create a content strategy around discussing the last 5 years, one post for each year.
•   Users are always looking for the inexpensive option. This is not a bad thing. Blog post topics can cover these angles; “Why not buy inexpensive ties” to “Certain types of lower quality ties that can make the difference”, etc. This all depends on your business stance and where you want to help.

This is just one example of one tool type that can inform your content topic generation. In general, you need a content strategy for your blog so you can consistently create evergreen posts that new users will always find valuable. Having high value content not only benefits you as a business, but it also benefits your end user. The goal is to help your users by informing, educating and inspiring them.

This article is provided by Korey Kashmer of Kashmer Interactive, LLC, Korey periodically writes for internet marketing publications online similar to NetPaths.