With the ubiquity of blogs, one of the questions we hear the most is how to come up with the right topics for new posts. In today's episode of Whiteboard Friday, Rand explores six different paths to great blog topic ideas, and tells you what you need to keep in mind before you start.
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Video transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, we're going to chat about blog post ideas, how to have great ones, how to make sure that the topics that you're covering on your blog actually accomplish the goals that you want, and how to not run out of ideas as well.
The goals of your blog
So let's start with the goals of a blog and then what an individual post needs to do, and then I'll walk you through kind of six formats for coming up with great ideas for what to blog about. But generally speaking, you have created a blog, either on your company's website or your personal website or for the project that you're working on, because you want to:
- Attract a certain audience, which is great.
- Capture the attention and amplification, the sharing of certain types of influencers, so that you can grow that audience.
- Rank highly in search engines. That's not just necessarily a goal for the blog's content itself. But one of the reasons that you started a blog is to grow the authority, the ranking signals, the ability to rank for the website as a whole, and the blog hopefully is helping with that.
- Inspire some trust, some likeability, loyalty, and maybe even some evangelism from your readers.
- Provide a reference point for their opinions. So if you are a writer, an author, a journalist, a contributor to all sorts of sources, a speaker, whatever it is, you're trying to provide a home for your ideas and your content, potentially your opinions too.
- Covert our audience to take an action. Then, finally, many times a blog is crafted with the idea that it is a first step in capturing an audience that will then take an action. That could be buy something from you, sign up for an email list, potentially take a free trial of something, maybe take some action. A political blog might be about, "Call your Congress person." But those types of actions.
What should an individual post do?
From there, we get into an individual post. An individual post is supposed to help with these goals, but on its own doesn't do all of them. It certainly doesn't need to do more than one at a time. It can hopefully do some. But one of those is, generally speaking, a great blog post will do one of these four things and hopefully two or even three.
I. Help readers to accomplish a goal that they have.
So if I'm trying to figure out which hybrid electric vehicle should I buy and I read a great blog post from someone who's very, very knowledgeable in the field, and they have two or three recommendations to help me narrow down my search, that is wonderful. It helps me accomplish my goal of figuring out which hybrid car to buy. That accomplishment of goal, that helping of people hits a bunch of these very, very nicely.
II. Designed to inform people and/or entertain them.
So it doesn't have to be purely informational. It doesn't have to be purely entertainment, but some combination of those, or one of the two, about a particular topic. So you might be trying to make someone excited about something or give them knowledge around it. It may be knowledge that they didn't previously know that they wanted, and they may not actually be trying to accomplish a goal, but they are interested in the information or interested in finding the humor.
III. Inspiring some amplification and linking.
So you're trying to earn signals to your site that will help you rank in search engines, that will help you grow your audience, that will help you reach more influencers. Thus, inspiring that amplification behavior by creating content that is designed to be shared, designed to be referenced and linked to is another big goal.
IV. Creating a more positive association with the brand.
So you might have a post that doesn't really do any of these things. Maybe it touches a little on informational or entertaining. But it is really about crafting a personal story, or sharing an experience that then draws the reader closer to you and creates that association of what we talked about up here -- loyalty, trust, evangelism, likeability.
6 paths to great blog topic ideas
So knowing what our blog needs to do and what our individual posts are trying to do, what are some great ways that we can come up with the ideas, the actual topics that we should be covering? I have kind of six paths. These six paths actually cover almost everything you will read in every other article about how to come up with blog post ideas. But I think that's what's great. These frameworks will get you into the mindset that will lead you to the path that can give you an infinite number of blog post ideas.
1. Are there any unanswered or poorly answered questions that are in your field, that your audience already has/is asking, and do you have a way to provide great answers to those?
So that's basically this process of I'm going to research my audience through a bunch of methodologies, going to come up with topics that I know I could cover. I could deliver something that would answer their preexisting questions, and I could come up with those through...
- Surveys of my readers.
- In-person meetings or emails or interviews.
- Informal conversations just in passing around events, or if I'm interacting with members of my audience in any way, social settings.
- Keyword research, especially questions.
So if you're using a tool like Moz's Keyword Explorer, or I think some of the other ones out there, Ahrefs might have this as well, where you can filter by only questions. There are also free tools like Answer the Public, which many folks like, that show you what people are typing into Google, specifically in the form of questions, "Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? Do?" etc.
So I'm not just going to walk you through the ideas. I'm also going to challenge myself to give you some examples. So I've got two -- one less challenging, one much more challenging. Two websites, both have blogs, and coming up with topic ideas based on this.
So one is called Remoters. It's remoters.net. It's run by Aleyda Solis, who many of you in the SEO world might know. They talk about remote work, so people who are working remotely. It's a content platform for them and a service for them. Then, the second one is a company, I think, called Schweiss Doors. They run hydraulicdoors.com. Very B2B. Very, very niche. Pretty challenging to come up with good blog topics, but I think we've got some.
Remote Worker: I might say here, "You know what? One of the questions that's asked very often by remote workers, but is not well-answered on the internet yet is: 'How do I conduct myself in a remote interview and present myself as a remote worker in a way that I can be competitive with people who are actually, physically on premises and in the room? That is a big challenge. I feel like I'm always losing out to them. Remote workers, it seems, don't get the benefits of being there in person.'" So a piece of content on how to sell yourself on a remote interview or as a remote worker could work great here.
Hydraulic doors: One of the big things that I see many people asking about online, both in forums which actually rank well for it, the questions that are asked in forums around this do rank around costs and prices for hydraulic doors. Therefore, I think this is something that many companies are uncomfortable answering right online. But if you can be transparent where no one else can, I think these Schweiss Doors guys have a shot at doing really well with that. So how much do hydraulic doors cost versus alternatives? There you go.
2. Do you have access to unique types of assets that other people don't?
That could be research. It could be data. It could be insights. It might be stories or narratives, experiences that can help you stand out in a topic area. This is a great way to come up with blog post content. So basically, the idea is you could say, "Gosh, for our quarterly internal report, we had to prepare some data on the state of the market. Actually, some of that data, if we got permission to share it, would be fascinating."
We can see through keyword research that people are talking about this or querying Google for it already. So we're going to transform it into a piece of blog content, and we're going to delight many, many people, except for maybe this guy. He seems unhappy about it. I don't know what his problem is. We won't worry about him. Wait. I can fix it. Look at that. So happy. Ignore that he kind of looks like the Joker now.
We can get these through a bunch of methodologies:
- Research, so statistical research, quantitative research.
- Crowdsourcing. That could be through audiences that you've already got through email or Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn.
- Insider interviews, interviews with people on your sales team or your product team or your marketing team, people in your industry, buyers of yours.
- Proprietary data, like what you've collected for your internal annual reports.
- Curation of public data. So if there's stuff out there on the web and it just needs to be publicly curated, you can figure out what that is. You can visit all those websites. You could use an extraction tool, or you could manually extract that data, or you could pay an intern to go extract that data for you, and then synthesize that in a useful way.
- Multimedia talent. Maybe you have someone, like we happen to here at Moz, who has great talent with video production, or with audio production, or with design of visuals or photography, or whatever that might be in the multimedia realm that you could do.
- Special access to people or information, or experiences that no one else does and you can present that.
Those assets can become the topic of great content that can turn into really great blog posts and great post ideas.
Remote Workers: They might say, "Well, gosh, we have access to data on the destinations people go and the budgets that they have around those destinations when they're staying and working remotely, because of how our service interacts with them. Therefore, we can craft things like the most and least expensive places to work remotely on the planet," which is very cool. That's content that a lot of people are very interested in.
Hydraulic doors: We can look at, "Hey, you know what? We actually have a visual overlay tool that helps an architect or a building owner visualize what it will look like if a hydraulic door were put into place. We can go use that in our downtime to come up with we can see how notable locations in the city might look with hydraulic doors or notable locations around the world. We could potentially even create a tool, where you could upload your own visual, photograph, and then see how the hydraulic door looked on there." So now we can create images that will help you share.
3. Relating a personal experience or passion to your topic in a resonant way.
I like this and I think that many personal bloggers use it well. I think far too few business bloggers do, but it can be quite powerful, and we've used it here at Moz, which is relating a personal experience you have or a passion to your topic in some way that resonates. So, for example, you have an interaction that is very complex, very nuanced, very passionate, perhaps even very angry. From that experience, you can craft a compelling story and a headline that draws people in, that creates intrigue and that describes something with an amount of emotion that is resonant, that makes them want to connect with it. Because of that, you can inspire people to further connect with the brand and potentially to inform and entertain.
There's a lot of value from that. Usually, it comes from your own personal creativity around experiences that you've had. I say "you," you, the writer or the author, but it could be anyone in your organization too. Some resources I really like for that are:
- Photos. Especially, if you are someone who photographs a reasonable portion of your life on your mobile device, that can help inspire you to remember things.
- A journal can also do the same thing.
- Conversations that you have can do that, conversations in person, over email, on social media.
- Travel. I think any time you are outside your comfort zone, that tends to be those unique things.
Remote workers: I visited an artist collective in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I realized that, "My gosh, one of the most frustrating parts of remote work is that if you're not just about remote working with a laptop and your brain, you're almost removed from the experience. How can you do remote work if you require specialized equipment?" But in fact, there are ways. There are maker labs and artist labs in cities all over the planet at this point. So I think this is a topic that potentially hasn't been well-covered, has a lot of interest, and that personal experience that I, the writer, had could dig into that.
Hydraulic doors: So I've had some conversations with do-it-yourselfers, people who are very, very passionate about DIY stuff. It turns out, hydraulic doors, this is not a thing that most DIYers can do. In fact, this is a very, very dramatic investment. That is an intense type of project. Ninety-nine percent of DIYers will not do it, but it turns out there's actually search volume for this.
People do want to, or at least want to learn how to, DIY their own hydraulic doors. One of my favorite things, after realizing this, I searched, and then I found that Schweiss Doors actually created a product where they will ship you a DIY kit to build your own hydraulic door. So they did recognize this need. I thought that was very, very impressive. They didn't just create a blog post for it. They even served it with a product. Super-impressive.
4. Covering a topic that is "hot" in your field or trending in your field or in the news or on other blogs.
The great part about this is it builds in the amplification piece. Because you're talking about something that other people are already talking about and potentially you're writing about what they've written about, you are including an element of pre-built-in amplification. Because if I write about what Darren Rowse at ProBlogger has written about last week, or what Danny Sullivan wrote about on Search Engine Land two weeks ago, now it's not just my audience that I can reach, but it's theirs as well. Potentially, they have some incentive to check out what I've written about them and share that.
So I could see that someone potentially maybe posted something very interesting or inflammatory, or wrong, or really right on Twitter, and then I could say, "Oh, I agree with that," or, "disagree," or, "I have nuance," or, "I have some exceptions to that." Or, "Actually, I think that's an interesting conversation to which I can add even more value," and then I create content from that. Certainly, social networks like:
- Forums
- Subreddits. I really like Pocket for this, where I'll save a bunch of articles, and then I'll see which one might be very interesting to cover or write about in the future. News aggregators are great for this too. So that could be a Techmeme in the technology space, or a Memeorandum in the political space, or many others.
Remote workers: You might note, well, health care, last week in the United States and for many months now, has been very hot in the political arena. So for remoters, that is a big problem and a big question, because if your health insurance is tied to your employer again, as it was before the American Care Act, then you could be in real trouble. Then you might have a lot of problems and challenges. So what does the politics of health care mean for remote workers? Great. Now, you've created a real connection, and that could be something that other outlets would cover and that people who've written about health care might be willing to link to your piece.
Hydraulic doors: One of the things that you might note is that Eater, which is a big blog in the restaurant space, has written about indoor and outdoor space trends in the restaurant industry. So you could, with the data that you've got and the hydraulic doors that you provide, which are very, very common, well moderately common, at least in the restaurant indoor/outdoor seating space, potentially cover that. That's a great way to tie in your audience and Eater's audience into something that's interesting. Eater might be willing to cover that and link to you and talk about it, etc.
The last two, I'm not going to go too into depth, because they're a little more basic.
5. Pure keyword research-driven.
So this is using Google AdWords or keywordtool.io, or Moz's Keyword Explorer, or any of the other keyword research tools that you like to figure out: What are people searching for around my topic? Can I cover it? Can I make great content there?
6. Readers who care about my topics also care about ______________?
Essentially taking any of these topics, but applying one level of abstraction. What I mean by that is there are people who care about your topic, but also there's an overlap of people who care about this other topic and who also care about yours.
hydraulic doors: People who care about restaurant building trends and hydraulic doors has a considerable overlap, and that is quite interesting.
Remote workers: It could be something like, "I care about remote work. I also care about the gear that I use, my laptop and my bag, and those kinds of things." So gear trends could be a very interesting intersect. Then, you can apply any of these other four processes, five processes onto that intersection or one level of an abstraction.
All right, everyone. We have done a tremendous amount here to cover a lot about blog topics. But I think you will have some great ideas from this, and I look forward to hearing about other processes that you've got in the comments. Hopefully, we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Again, a great WBF Rand!
I have been using a simple tactic (used by many) to figure out topics for blogs that are relevant to my audience. What I do is take help of customer support team and ask them to pen down every complaint/query they receive from customers (over phone calls/chatbox/emails, etc.) in a Google doc sheet. Then we filter them out on a priority basis to see what is that we need to address first, and we roll out blog posts accordingly addressing customer's issues.
Another tool that I use to search for what people are searching for which is relevant to my industry/audience is https://bloomberry.com/. It's an awesome tool that shows almost all the questions related to a topic asked over the internet.
Thanks
Great, great WF Rand! Thank you!
Blogging is not an easy subject. But if you are connected to your audience and you know what your target audience is interested in, you might be able to find interesting topics again and again. Obviously research is also important, as mentioned in the video above as well. After all, the world is constantly changing and there is always something new and interesting to talk about.
In my view not the quantity, rather the quality is the most important. If you run a blog you don't have to post a new blog post every 2-3 days, it's more beneficial in investing more time and create only one, but long format blog post (more than 1500 words) every month. According to a research done by the guys at Backlinko it seems that long format blog posts outperform short ones anyway.
Hey Laszlo,
Agree with you here that blogging is a very important to build a community online and share some well-written stuff. But, I differ to the point that you need long blog posts to have a successful blog. I believe it depends on the user's search intent and query. Long posts are great when it comes to creating guides, tutorials, case studies, etc. because they address a lot of related issues here in detail. But, if the search's intent is about getting some quick updates and news, I believe shorter blogs do perform well. If that was not the case, I don't think Barry's Search Engine Roundtable was that big a success.
Thanks
I do agree with your thoughts Laszlo, exactly whatever you said is right.
Hi Lazlo,
I am with you. I honestly prefer to talk deeply about one topic so that I can create something really useful for my audience. It will have sooner or later a better impact not only on my audience but in SEO as, as far as I know (I am not a SEO expert) browsers always like long high quality content rather than shorter ones.
Thanks
@Laszlo Totally agree! and @rand great work like always, came here looking for some answers and I got exactly what I needed. Thanks guys!
Every blogger wants to write an appealing and interesting blog post but it's never an easy task to do so. That's why they always search in Google for new and creative Ideas, They do research, they do a study on that subjects on which they want to write a blog post. But the information, ideas, and motivation we always get through MOZ's blog rarely can get on other sites. Awesome post it is.
Rand, this is the most amazing WB Friday. I'd like to just add a little pro tip for local businesses and their marketers. Add geography to almost any of these strategies and you've got endless potential for blog posts that tie industry, audience and geographic interests together. A winning combo!
Thanks Rand! This is one of my favorite topics to explore as a copywriter and content marketer! I've been using some of the strategies you talk about already. Coincidentally my boss and I gave a lunch and learn presentation to the account managers here at BizIQ and my boss is sharing this Whiteboard Friday episode with them as a follow up to the course. Thanks again!
Wow, this is pure gold. These are many important and necessary questions before starting a seo strategy. I will send many of my customers here.
Hello Rand
i am reading your blog last few Month and they are very helpful to implement SEO technique.
Keep Post
Thanks
In two words: AWE - SOME.
Lol.
Great post, I use Kewyword mapping with the GSC help, and the intern search to identify new blog post opportunities.
Thank you
Hi Rand,
Very insightful post! Here are a few more things -
1) Word of mouth factor: Creating community among users will increase the trust flow of your brand.
2) Interesting facts: Share interesting/funny facts for your product/services.
3) Linking to old post: Each post is a valuable asset, It will give a new life to your blog post.
4) Appreciation: Show appreciation for someone else in your field.
Thanks.
Totally agree with number (1) and specially number (3). The community effect and link old post make your brand stronger.
Hi Rand,
Thanks for yet another great WBF.
I am a big user of the questions on KeywordTools.io, as you mentioned.
There are a few techniques you might wish to add to the list:
INTERNAL SEARCH: the internal search on your website is a good source of questions that need answering. It may be that you have never addressed the subject or that the questioner is just coming at it from a different viewpoint. I know this is a classic oldie but still worth mentioning for some newbies.
QUORA: Quora can be a great source of topics with volumes included. You just look up your area of interest and see what you don't already have covered. It will also tell you the relative volumes. You can sort of tell which ones have been picked up by Google search because the traffic is much higher than what would normally occur in Quora alone.
PAA: The new infinite "People Also Ask" boxes are another obvious source of questions to answer.
Thanks again for the ideas!
E.
Would love to see closed captioning on your videos.
OMG! I had them and I totally forgot to upload them to the video. Take another look and you'll find the CC's are ready to go. Thanks for the heads-up! :)
Blog idea research and generation generally takes 20% of our time while content productions. It makes huge difference.
Hi Rand,
Always an awesome post, thanks for sharing!
I read through the comments as well and some great points by the community. Similar to Praveen, I have also been a big fan of bloomberry.
I just wanted to add that I have found some great blog ideas by looking through the comment sections of my current blog (and competitor's blogs). It helps to find topics that people are looking for and keep users coming back, showing how responsive we can be.
I think that the big issue today is the clickbait as well. According to a lot of headlines I expect some great content but all I get is general and uninteresting piece of text. But not on Moz, of course. Thanks for educating about writing and blogging, Rand. Cheers, Martin
Hi Rand, Great, absolutely great. Fyi Schweiss Doors recently launched hydraulicdoors.com to provide a mobile-friendly blog for our followers. Bifold.com has been blogging since 2006. We've found even obscure businesses can appeal to a wide audience with interesting stories and good coverage, more awareness is a two for one!
Very useful post sir, Good takeaways. I for one utilize your first tip frequently which is searching for user queries in Quora , niche forums topic ideas. These questions are usually incorporate answers made by others so that we can take inspiration and improve upon them.
Thank You Rand Fishkin.
I agree with point no 4, and I've tried to use hot topics. The result is increased blog traffic over 100%.
Hi Rand,
An amazing article indeed.
Blogging can be a very rewarding career. It provides time, location and financial freedom! I have been blogging for the past 10 years and I will be blogging for the rest of my life. It is definitely fun and rewarding.
However, if you do not choose the right topic for your blog, you will fail. Your blogging success depends on the topic that you choose to blog about.
To help serious and amateur bloggers, I have come up with a 100 day blogging course where I setup a brand new blog on a completely new category and take up the challenge of increase traffic and revenue for the blog.
Here I have tried to address all the concerns that an aspiring blogger faces.I hope this way I can provide a head start to quite a lot of people who are procrastinating blogging for one reason or the other.
Super job drilling in on a traditional/"boring" B2B example, Rand. There are so many B2B companies in more mature industries that don't fully understand how the buying experience is evolving to online (even if it's not a e-comm type of purchase) and what impact that truly has on their business.
They "get it' for B2C, but not for B2B. Might be an opportunity to spend some more time looking at traditional industries to help that audience understand. That said, they may not be watching (even though they need it the most!). :)
Love whiteboard Friday. Love it. I have been thinking about keyword research a lot lately and really believe that it's a great tool to reach your audience. My questions are:
(1) What tools are out there that access the ease of ranking with a keyword? I know that this is available on professional search tools but are there alternatives for the part time bloggers.
(2) How much lead time would I need to plan for to rank on a trending topic. I heard a good rule of thumb is 60 days to index new material so would I have to guess a keyword that would still be trending in 60 days? What factors go into making this estimate.
Keep up the good work-
That’s a cool shirt Rand. All your blog need is sharing and voila, you have the best blog available for the right audience. Humor is important in making the reader interested and not bore them out of their skull. People refrain from reading a blog too long (which does not have any satire of course) even if it contains useful research. It is certainly not the case in Moz’s blogs.
Crowdsourcing is brilliant in my opinion. It really stands out from all of your suggestions. Crowdsourcing can help to pick up brains of millions of people. Truly, it is an underrated activity. It is the best way to clutter more ideas.
Thanks again for an amazing WBF Rand.
Great post.. All ideas are great!! When I post a blog my main target is how to attract the user, I used great topic ideas and which is the current trends- these are my main goal for blog posting.
Great blog! I was writing some blog posts for my company. I wanted to get them onto Moz but Youmoz isn't letting me for some reason does anyone know how I can do this?
Blog posts can be very beneficial with regards to SEO as it creates more pages on your site that Google absolutely love. Not only this it also creates the relevancy of your site. If your site is about cars and you want to sell cars, the best thing to do is to have a Youtube account set up. uploading Videos of these cars maybe and Downloading a tool called VidIQ, it is a Google Chrome extension that allows you to see the SEO on other videos. Make sure this is as fully completed as possible then attach this to your blog with the embed code. Once completed this you should then add images with the right ALT Tags and descriptions and make sure they are spaced out correctly. Making sure your blog is separated with the right headers as well is an important factor.
Again Great blog cheers for this it will help me with my upcoming blog posts!
Hi Cory,
I really liked yor approach about the impact of Youtube videos in the SEO. I know it's always good to add them in your blog as it's a great way to teach people in a easy and nice way and Google definitely likes it.
I didn't know that about adding ALT tags in them as I normally embed them as an iframe tag though. Can you please advice about how and where to add those tags please?
Sorry for my poor english. Being spanish does not help too much but I am trying my best!
Thanks!
Hi Cory,
Youmoz has stopped accepting submissions a few months ago. You can read more about it here.
For someone struggling with chronic writers block, this has definitely inspired me to get back on the horse and write something.
Too many good ideas here and easy ways to get started. Sometimes you just need reminding of the basics to get the mind and pen to paper rolling again.
Do admire that you 'challenged yourself' to make some suggestions of topics for two random sites you aren't affiliated with; what's more one of them is even in a 'boring niche'! ; -)
I would lower some of the numbers to save work.. Use maybe 3 Secrets, or 7 Tricks. Also use How to, and Things you must not forget. But I did just do a "17 Tricks" post here. https://www.excaliburwebsites.com/17-amazing-profit-generating-tricks/
I make it so they can download a pdf, or input their email to finish an article, too. Thank you.
Abosolutely right on point Rand, the right topic at the right time can be the difference between little to no reach, and viral status. Great insight on the topical keyword research strategies, I have heard that Buzzsumo is a good tool for this as well.
Thank you so much for this video, great stuff and going really in-depth here!
Would it be correct to say that a blog can also be used to rank for more KWs, not just to try to be relevant in my industry?
You know when I started my blog I always find new blogs for more traffic but didn’t know about where Google policy of user intent and user friendly content but now I work on user friendly content which public need and I have 200+ per day visitors.
I think I've just got the idea on visual elements for my future blog posts :) Thanks, Rand!
Hi Rand, thanks for sharing these amazing strategies for unlimited generation of new blog post ideas! No doubt, I will implement them while creating new articles for SEO Newbie Box blog.
Unfortunately, I haven't any audio or video production skills (as you have here, at Moz), but it seems to be a good idea to get them via some educational course.
It is essential to have appropriate blog post topics in todays world. Excelent post!
Hi Rand,
This post is absolutely a must for those people who want to write the right articles for the right audience. Some of your ideas were already known by me but others not and it's always great to learn something new so that you can apply it later, analyze your results and improve your strategy.
So, thanks!
I have a mentor who uses to say that before writing your post you must know in advance why you are doing it and what are you expecting to get.
And of course, this post should be capable of (at least of one these features):
Apologize for my english. Not so god yet!
Hopefully you will get the idea!
Thanks!
Thanks for the post rand. Very useful information regarding earning brand loyalty and potential customers. Ofcourse the key to earn potential customers is to be honest and write realy helpful topics the for audiance. So they can inspire and take advantage from the post.
First i am trying to figured out what my audiance realy needs and preparing some kinds of curosic topics asblow. This way i am realy getting a good potantial traffic.
Hi Rand,
Thank you for the Blog Topic Generation Tips. Similar to your first one about the unanswered or poorly answered question strategy, I will be doing SEO work and find myself stumped on something. Where is the first place we all usually go when we need to find a solution? Google, of course. When the articles i'm reading do not directly or quickly answer my question---or maybe not even help me to find a solution at all, I see that as an opening. I know that others are others out there dealing with this issue, and that if I solve the problem myself and document it, it can have a lot of potential. One of the first times I successfully did this was when AMP was brand new. I implemented it to a website, and then saw errors in Search Console. I looked for an answer, and couldn't find one online. I solved the problem myself, wrote a blog post on it, and we still see good traffic to that post now. At this point, I'd like to republish it with any other errors and fixes I come up with, to make the post more robust, helpful to users, and visible in search.
This was a timely post, as i'm developing blog topics for various clients right now. I look forward to utilizing some of these strategies. Thank you so much for taking the time to make these weekly videos, they are beyond helpful.
-Ray
Much needed WBF Rand! Thanks
I completely agree with how once can finalize the topic for blog! Mostly question based or 10 or 5 Things type blogs or blog that's solving any common issue gets more impression than others.
Your blog was too good. i really appreciate with your blog. I really appreciate this wonderful post that you have provided for us. .This post is absolutely a must for those people who want to write the right articles for the right audience. Thanks for sharing.
Hey Rand, I have a question about what is going to happen a year from now with keywords and blog topics. I've seen just in the past year so many small businesses jumping into blogging. I mainly show insurance agents how to blog, how to do keyword research, etc... But there are a couple potential problems I see:
1. Many blogs answering questions and attacking the long tail. It is getting harder to find questions that are not already answered or finding long tail posts that have not already been used that people are searching for. Before, the answer was to write a longer and better blog but now there are many blogs that have packed as much detail as possible into a blog.
2. We are also seeing large companies paying for freelance and blog experts. There is one company in mind, but I'm sure more to follow, that has invested most of their marketing budget into SEO & blogging experts. They write very well written posts that are long and descriptive but the site also has tons of very high quality links. I've watched them over the past year knock other agencies (even our own posts) out of the top Google rankings. They will also continue to invest in their efforts.
So with this huge out pouring of increased bloggers and large entities getting into the game, how can the average Joe compete in ranking? And when will it get to the point where there are simply so many blogs on the same topics that a well written guide or blog will not rank because there are 100 other well written blogs?