Getting Content Ideas for Your Search Engine Optimization

Many websites dominate the search engines by publishing lots of content. This makes sense because more content will attract more backlinks and draw more search traffic. It’s a robust strategy because when you have hundreds of web pages, a few pages that drop in search rank won’t have much of an impact on your business. However, if you don’t have a large team of content writers, how do you come up with hundreds of content ideas?

This can be difficult at first when you’ve used up your initial set of ideas. However, there are several tried-and-true techniques for getting content ideas. Here are four of them:

Write Blog Posts Based on Your Product’s Benefits

These are not sales pitches where the product is introduced and the rest of the content persuades your readers to buy it. Instead, it’s like a sales pitch written in reverse order, where the product is mentioned at the end, almost as an afterthought. Start the post by introducing a common pain point of your market, and proceed to give helpful tips and other information on solving it. Near the end of the post, introduce a product that makes the solution easier to achieve in less time.

The more products you have, the more blog posts of this type you can write. Products with multiple uses provide the basis for many posts.

Base Content on Visitor and Customer Feedback

On your newsletters and blog posts, encourage your readers to write back with their questions or to comment on your blog. Comments and email that ask questions or express frustration provide you with more pain points for which you can post solutions in your blog content. The questions received by your customer service people also provide valuable topics for future blog posts.

Visit the Online Communities of Your Market

Forums and social media are excellent sources of information about your market. This is distinct from using them as marketing platforms or traffic sources. Instead, you’re only there to gather information from your market’s unsolicited comments and questions. Look for questions and comments expressing pain points relevant to your business and products. These comments also provide insights into your market’s mind set, which enable you to write more engaging content.

Gather Intelligence From the Competition

Viewing the popular content of your competitors tells you which topics resonate most with your market. If there are any topics not covered on your blog, fill in the gap by writing your own content. Include subtopics based on comments left on your competitors’ sites. Look for blog posts with lots of comments, which are an indicator of how well the topic engaged the readers.

For more information about search engine optimization or if you require assistance in this area, please contact us.