You’ve heard how important it is to maintain a weekly blog on your business website. It’s critical for SEO and social media and will support your AdWords campaigns. While it’s great that you’ve committed to a blog schedule, how can you know if your content is of any interest to the customers/clients you want to attract? The last thing you want to do is spend resources creating content only to “speak” to an empty room.
There is a science to creating an effective content strategy that drives qualified traffic and conversions. And yes, there is an investment involved in partnering with an expert content marketing firm. That said, there are practical ways to identify exactly what your customers/clients want information on. Equally important, is identifying exactly how they are searching for this information. The latter is the only way to ensure your blog posts get found on Google search. To help you get started, we have provided tips to identifying the types of articles your customers/clients want to read, and exactly how they are searching for them.
Practical Tips to Generating Search Engine Optimized Blog Content that Prospective Customers/Clients Actually Care About
Beginners: Let Google Autocomplete be Your Guide
Google Autocomplete confirms that people are regularly searching a specific keyword phrase, per month. If your subsequent blog post ends up ranking on Google for this search expression, that consumer interest will generate website traffic, and possibly conversions. Confirming consumer interest also means that you can use the blog post to generate clicks from social media and PPC campaigns.
Where do you start? Let the five Ws (who, what, where, when, why) lead the way. All that you need to do is enter one of the Ws into the Google search bar, append your product/service, possibly another word or two, and let autocomplete work its magic.
Let’s look at queries that are relevant to a mortgage brokerage, as an example:
By typing in “what mort…” a brokerage immediately unveils five exact match topics (with titles) that they can create blog posts for.
Let’s try the same for dentists who specialize in implants:
Let’s look at landscape designers/architects:
You get the idea.
Let Google autocomplete lead the way and you’re blog schedule will attract dozens if not hundreds (possibly thousands) of monthly searches in your area.
Advanced: Dedicated Google Tools
Once you’ve become accustomed to this process we encourage you to educate yourself further by leveraging dedicate tools that Google provides. Google AdWords Keyword Planner is a big help. The intent of this free tool is to help business owners discover regularly searched keyword expressions in their area, providing estimates of the cost to target consumers who are performing those searches. The good news, is that you an use this free tool even if you don’t invest in PPC.
Simply create a Google Ads account to get free access to Keyword Planner. From there, click on the Keyword Planner (must be signed into access) and you’ll find the Discover New Keywords portal:
Click on Discover new keywords and you’ll get this:
From here, select your default language and location (country and/or city) and you’re all set.
Returning to our mortgage brokerage example, you can verify how many people per month are using the search expressions that you identified. Let’s say that you (mortgage broker) want to know how many people are searching “What mortgage can I afford Canada”. Keyword Planner will tell you:
You find that up to 1000 people per month are searching for your desired blog post target using that exact string of words (your article title). Better yet, Keyword Planner makes other suggestions that you can use for supplementary blog posts to come.
By using the information above you can identify topics and exact titles to use for future blog posts for your website. It’s a great start to your new content marketing strategy. Of course, churning out high-quality search engine optimized content that will actually rank on Google Page One on a regular basis requires an expert touch. Do you want more traffic from qualified customers/clients? Contact Strategis Consulting Group for an audit of your blog strategy and online marketing plan.