How to Find Blog Post Ideas using Keyword Research

One of the most useful aspects of keyword research is as a guided brainstorming tool to help find blog post ideas that are valuable and useful, and above all, popular.

As long as you follow a process, you can almost guarantee never to run out of ideas. However, the process also needs to deal with ways to track and organise those ideas and topics so that you can make the best use of them.

Luckily, popular blog platforms such as Blogger and WordPress, as well as tools like Search Console, Analytics and Stat Counter can all be used to help you make sure that you are getting the best out of the keyword research and blog idea generation process.

How to Get Blog Post Ideas

The following is a simple, pretty unrefined process that ought to serve as a great starting point for generating a simple blog post. Before you begin you need to identify your Root Keyword Phrase, which can just be a single word, to represent the part of your niche tat you want to write about.

For example, for this post (you don't think I do these things in the dark, do you?) I simply chose the word 'blog' and picked the first phrase that fitted from a simple Keyword Planner search, ordered by Volume.

I ended up with 'blog post'.

Next, head on over to KeywordTool.io, and type in your Root Keyword Phrase, copy the result list to the clipboard, and paste it into the Keyword Planner. Do another search, then select, this time by a combination of Volume and CPC, the most appropriate result: this is your Target Keyword Phrase.

In this case, I chose 'blog post ideas'. Topical.

Finally, go to the AnswerThePublic.com web site, and enter your Target Keyword Phrase and hit Search. From the resulting collection of Questions, Prepositions and Alphabetically Listed results, you need to select the best 4 to use as H2 Headings, and one to use as the Title.

Simply put these into blank blog post, and write 500-700 words of great content!

Of course, what's likely to happen is that you get distracted by lots of shiny new objects in the form of rather attractive keyword phrases.

It would be a shame to discard them completely, so instead it's a good idea to organise them for future use.

How to Organise Blog Post Ideas

Typically, you will end up with groups of blog post ideas:

• questions - "where to get blog post ideas"
• how-to's - "how to get blog post ideas"
• reviews - "what's the best blog platform"
• discussions - "should I blog for business"
• etc.

The trick is to separate them out into Titles and H2 Headings. I like to use a mind map to group the H2 Headings under the Titles; as well as making sure that I pay attention to where, when, and how they have been used.

Tracking them in this way has two advantages: one, you know which ones are generating traffic, and secondly, you can interlink pieces according to topics, to generate a web of content that will be picked up by search engines.

How to Track Blog Post Ideas

Tracking goes beyond whether you've used an idea: you also need to keep account of how many articles it appears in, what the competition was at the time it was 'discovered', and what the traffic generation (acquisition) profile has been.

For example, for my target keyword phrase 'how to find blog post ideas' I know that there are 8,740 results in Google's UK database. I also know that there's about 100 searches for this exact phrase every month.

At the same time, I know that for "blog post ideas", there's about 10,000 searches, at an average anticipated cost per click (thanks Keyword Planner!) of around £1.

As yet, though, this post has not generated any traffic, according to Analytics, nor has it been viewed in search engine results pages (SERPs) according to the Search Console.

These are all metrics that you should track in order to create a picture of the success of each blog post.

Blog Post Ideas for Businesses

Top of the list has to be FAQs, or Frequently Asked Questions, about your products, brand, services, etc. I have another phrase for FAQs, though, and that's Fairly Anticipated Questions: the hint is in the title -- don't wait for the questions, use AnswerThePublic to actively look for them.

Obviously how-to's are another great subject: especially if they can be linked to subsidiary products, or repeat purchases and alternative uses for your products or services. Again, though, don't forget to do the keyword research to establish demand, and include CTAs (Call to Action) on each carefully-tuned page.

Another important one is the checklist post. These include lists of items that you believe customers should be doing. Each one has to be a carefully constructed keyword phrase, however, in order to get the best performance from the post.

Finally, reviews, previews, and industry news commentary are all very good blog post ideas for businesses. Use keyword research to find blog post ideas by combining root keyword phrases together and using them as search queries in Google.

Scroll right down to the bottom for a selection of Google-suggested blog post ideas!

For more ideas, get The Niche Blogger Content Blueprint for tips, ideas, processes and repeatable procedures that will help you to generate, track and test blog posts that are based on real world keyword research.

Happy blogging!

3 Simple Ways to Multiply Keyword Effectiveness: Immediately!

A big part of my philosophy for strategic keyword management centres around three core activities:

• Knowing how people become aware of your site;
• Tracking how many of them actually visit your site;
• Observing what they do whet they get there.

Retailers who have primarily a bricks and mortar establishment can substitute "site" for "shop", "salon", "showroom", "office", and so on. The principle is the same; this isn't about pure SEO.

So, why are these three aspects of keyword research so important?

Keywords Help People to Find You

It doesn't matter whether you are the author of a book, a web site owner, or run a seaside café, people find you because they have needs or desires.

They will express those needs and desires in keywords; whether they want to ask someone in the street, or search online.

Someone who is looking for a latté in Bournemouth is going to be a lot more interested in a café that has a big sign in the window saying "Best Latté in Bournemouth or Your Money Back!" than one offering "Cut Price Cream Teas for Students".

It's the same online.

When someone performs a query, they're only going to click on a site that appears to confirm their needs or desires through the use of keywords. Not just the keywords they type, by the way, but also those that make one sit more attractive than another.

Knowing what keywords people have used to find your site (whether they've clicked through or not) is useful. It's also a measurable statistic provided by the Search Console, and also, via integration with SC, in StatCounter.com (although they still call it GWT!)

And, this metric is also useful offline: just ask customers how they found you, and from that you'll quickly work out what internal keywords they had in their minds when they made the decision to choose your establishment compared to the others on the high street.

Doing this analysis -- and acting on the results -- takes you from merely advertising, to attracting.

Measuring Attraction Helps Build a Better Campaign

Once you know which keywords are getting you visibility, you need to know which of them are also getting you visitors, or better still, customers.

Typically, a keyword campaign can have one of several goals:

• building awareness;
• attracting new customers;
• re-attracting existing customers;

In the first case, all you want to know is whether your brand is getting seen. Search engines are making that a lot easier these days by including extracts from the landing page associated with a keyword alongside the result.

Managing that meta-data is a vital part of SEO.

The second case is linked to actions. You need to know, having gained awareness, which conjunction of keywords and search entry lead to action. That means putting non-active keywords in the meta-data so that it is displayed.

A non-active keyword is one that is not part of the keyword phrase which defines the primary motive for a search user: for example, the query "latté bournemouth" will return a page of results, and if one of the displayed meta-data snippets contains the word 'free', that café may well find the attract more custom, but "free" is not an active keyword.

The resulting campaign may well be a combination of the active and non-active keywords, for example, a PPC campaign using the keyword phrase 'free latté bournemouth'. 

(I'm not saying that's necessarily an example that will work in the real world, by the way, but if you go through the motions, the result may well be positive!)

Finally, using trackable keyword phrases in your re-activation campaigns also helps to improve them; re-attracting customers by email or physical mailing is much easier if you have researched the keywords that your target market uses to find your competitors.

All of these work online as well as offline. Offline measurement methods just tend to be a bit more involved. Offline or not, however, measuring the behaviour that stems from a simple customer visit provides the best measure of how effective a keyword campaign has been.

Behavioural Analysis Measures the Effectiveness of Keywords

There used to be -- actually, I still use a variation -- a measure called KEI. This stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index, and was supposed to represent the relative ease with which it was possible to score highly in the SERPs.

It was a simple measure: all it really did was manipulate the anticipated volume and number of competing sites to try and gauge your chances of hitting the top 10.

Here's a funny anecdote, though.

On one of my own sites that I use for researching strategies, I have a highly effective keyword that isn't in the top 10. It's barely in the top 100. And, in terms of the CTR alone, it's reasonably effective:

What's more, as you can see from the screen shot, it's also not an isolated case; there's one right next to it with a similarly impressive CTR.

When I dig into the "Visitor Activity" log provided by StatCounter.com, I can see that, for the target market, these queries both have above average engagement based on the landing page:

• higher visit time
• more pages viewed
• repeat visits

This view is derived from knowing which page a visitor is likely to land on as a result of the query (by conducting a live query) and reviewing the Visitor Activity for that URL.

Expanding the search to related pages confirms that this query is more effective than many that appear nearer the top of the SERPs. That is, for the pages that are also returned as a result (but even lower down the SERPs) they also show high levels of engagement and conversion.

This is part of the attraction of the so-called long tail, of course. More specific pages with highly niche information that don't necessarily attract the most traffic are quite often the most effective when measured in terms unrelated to pure volume and cost.

Bigger, as they say, is not always better.

For a solid, step by step approach to keyword research that has consistently proven to be unaffected by algorithm changes, download the Keyword Research Blueprint!

Plan Do Check Act, SMART Goals and A/B Split Testing

Split testing is a valuable part of strategic keyword management. For a start, it allows you to throw away those keywords that aren't bringing in the results -- but at the same time, it gives you an opportunity to improve on so many areas of your retail marketing effort that learning it is a transferable skill in itself.

Of course, this article looks at split testing from the point of view of keyword management, but it can be, and has been, applied to all kinds of result-dependent activity.

By result-dependent we mean an activity that has a clearly defined and measurable goal; one which produces results that further our guiding strategy.

In strategic management terms, these are results that keep us in line with our mission and contribute to a sustainable competitive advantage.

At the core is something that I may well have alluded to before: PDCA.

Plan Do Check Act

The PDCA cycle (also known as Deming's Cycle) is something that I first came across in the context of process improvement. For a great overview, try the US Navy's Handbook for Basic Process Improvement, which is part of their Strategic Planning collection of documents.

(It's pretty lengthy, so don't get sidetracked, but there's a lot of useful flowcharts in there that can be easily applied to outsourced projects i.e. manual keyword expansion from a root keyword phrase, and checking of vital keyword effectiveness metrics against baseline measurements, and so on.)

The point of PDCA is that you first make a plan. Then, you carry out a process that has been created to achieve the goal set out in the plan.

Next comes a period of checking -- were the expected results achieved? -- and adjusting the process (the Do) part so that there is a higher chance of achieving the goals set out in the Plan.

In a nutshell, that's the Deming cycle, and it can be applied to a lot of different activities. Such as: A/B split testing of keyword rich headlines that form part of an advert campaign (on AdSense, for example).

However, before we look at A/B split testing (the process, or 'Do' part), we need to make sure that we understand what it is supposed to achieve. For that, I like to use SMART goals.

SMART Goals

There's a great discussion of the various meanings behind the SMART moniker on the Project Smart web site. While you're free to choose a set that make sense to you, here's what I recommend:

• S : specific (i.e. not at all vague)
• M : measurable (i.e. numerically)
• A : achievable (i.e. not unrealistic)
• R : results-oriented (i.e. has to take you to where you want to go)
• T : time-bound (i.e. set a time and/or cost limit)

In this case, your goal might be to increase click-through rates by 1% within 6 months by varying keyword placement in an advert heading.

The goal is set, but what is the process that will deliver the desired result?

A/B Split Testing

The driving principle behind A/B split testing is that you have two test cases, and you want to see which one performs the best. When you find that out, you devise another case and pitch it against the current best performer.

It sounds simple... and it is.

Within our PDCA process, it's the 'Do' part:

• Plan : "increase click-through rates by 1% within 6 months by varying keyword placement in an advert heading";
• Do : execute split testing for up to 6 months (or when CTRs increase by 1%)
• Check : did we achieve the goal?
• Act : if not, how can we improve/change the process?

The point is that Google AdWords will present you with hundreds of keyword phrases, along with data to help you pick the best one. But, it's the best one from Google's point of view, or at a push the best one that's identified using anonymised data.

It might not be the best one for you.

By split testing across candidate keywords, you can easily figure out which gives you the best return on your investment. Here, we've only put the goal in terms of CTR, but it could equally have been oriented around the eventual action of the visitor.

I've also talked about varying keyword phrases, but what about varying the words around those phrases? A great source of variations can be found in a free eBook "87 Marketing Secrets of the Written Word" by the legendary Ted Nicholas (link goes to his main site, and isn't an affiliate link.)

By picking carefully and pitching different combinations of words against each other, you will quickly build up a reliable list of variations for your chosen niche, as long as you follow PDCA, SMART and A/B Split Testing principles.

On Tools & Conversion Rates: Notes from the Trenches of Strategic Keyword Management

Today, you get a twofer: as in, two for one.

Firstly, an update on this post about tools being put beyond use. Now, I'm not going to name names, but two of the tools I pay for and use regularly have been put beyond use (albeit temporarily) thanks to an AdWords change in the Keyword Planner.

Remember that I postulated that this was, at least, one tool that wouldn't be changed in a hurry?

It turns out I was partially wrong. In their recent article "Google says bots are the main target of Keyword Planner changes", Search Engine Land's Ginny Marvin says the following:

"The reality is that Google’s keyword research tools were designed to help advertisers develop their search campaigns. The availability of the External Keyword Tool for years, however, set expectations that it should be open and available to all."

For those who are unaware of the pending changes -- I say pending, because not everyone will be affected straight away, and it's likely that different accounts will be affected in different ways  -- they centre around restricting data to accounts that have been designated as research-only.

In other words, if you don't spend with AdWords, then you don't get the data.

Economically, with my academic hat on, it makes sense. Strategically, though, it's a bit at odds with Alphabet's Don't be Evil mantra, and the SEO / KWR part of me can't help but think that limiting data that helps content creators research what people are looking for, and willing to pay for, is only going to result in content blanket bombing and post-publication keyword research.

In other words, we're going to go back to speculative content spinning around known search terms, just to see where the content gets placed in Google's index (via the Search Console and Analytics reports) rather than pro-active keyword research.

While reactive keyword research -- as I call it -- certainly has its place in your keyword research toolbox, what we don't want is a sudden glut of spun content designed to test the viability of keywords, and provide no real value.

Meanwhile, the tools I mentioned? They rely on API access, and seem to be being throttled, either by the tool's creator, or by the API limits, such that they have ceased working. I'm sure a fix is in the works, and I have standby techniques that, while a bit more long winded, get me to the same place.

A case of do as I say, and as I do, for once!

Meanwhile on a more positive note...

There's a great graph on Jason Tabeling's Search Engine Watch article "Online-to-offline search value is exploding with 'near me' searches"that illustrates something that I've been pushing out to retail clients for a while now.

In a recent post "How Keyword Research can help High Street Retailers", I pointed out that many people are now comparing retailers on the high street whilst actually being on the high street with mobile devices in hand.

The anecdotal evidence is borne out by Tabeling's research, and it turns out that "near me" searches are pretty likely to be conducted on a mobile device, which is interesting.

More interesting from a retailer's point of view is his assertion that advertisers "are paying 30% more for 'near me' searches compared to searches with other terms, even though our data showed literally ZERO conversions for 'near me' terms."

Readers of my "Cheat Sheet" eBook will know that part of the strategic management of keywords pivots around PPC campaigns, and looking for the money in the market (think Search Volume x Cost Per Click).

Tabeling's research shows that 'near me' searches attract a very high CPC, have solid volume, but don't get the clicks. In other words, advertisers are spending for the sole purpose of exposure -- probably with their physical address -- near the top of the SERPs, or in AdSense side-bars.

He suggests that it's time for all advertisers -- and I would say, clicks'n'bricks retailers especially -- to review how they track conversion rates for so-called online-to-offline traffic, as in this new digital advertising reality, conversion "might not be from the traditional online search, but from a find a store visit or a click-to-call action."

Measuring the ROI might not be the simplest part of strategic keyword management, but as in other aspects of retail, it is vital to know how much you are getting back for the spend that is being forced upon you.

Zero Traffic Keyword Research Technique To Maximise Results

Recently, I had a client who was panicking over a new blog. For affiliates, who make their money selling other people’s products, using their own content to create the opportunity to make a sale and build a list, a lack of traffic is somewhat disturbing.

However, just because a page has no hits, it doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been seen.

In fact, it’s likely to have been seen by the one entity that could make a difference: the Googlebot. Not only that, but if it has been indexed, the message is probably getting in front of an audience -- even a limited one -- something which can come as a surprise for those new to keyword research and search engine optimisation.

Search Console: Your Personal SEO Keyword Search Tool

To help website owners, Google used to have a tool known as the GWT (Google Webmaster Tools) which linked Analytics to Search. Since GWT was a bit of a misnomer, Google renamed it to Search Console.

It does what it says on the tin: it is a website owner's view on search, from Google’s point of view.

Take a look at the following screenshot:

At first sight, it’s a bit worrying. There are clearly no page views, which means that there will be a CTR (click through ratio) of 0%. Usually, SC is used to track the effectiveness of keywords in terms of that ratio. Without it, clients start to panic.

However, the Search Console also reveals some other interesting statistics which are a veritable goldmine for someone who helps webmasters boost their traffic on the back of strategic keyword management.

Let’s add a few more bits of information to the table:

Now, we can see that Google has not only indexed the pages on the site, but also ranked them, and displayed the listings to potential customers. Okay, so they are well down in the rankings (5.5 - 42.0 isn’t a great result, by any stretch), but at least the following is being seen in the results:

• The title;
• The meta data;
• The summary content.

What’s more, SC is also telling us for which specific keywords the Googlebot has indexed the content. Now, the question is -- are these the keywords that represent the content accurately?

If you conduct outlier analysis on a scatter graph of CTR against SERP (Position or Rank), you’ll see, for a crowded list of keywords, that in the upper right quadrant, where the CTR is high, and where results are well down in the SERPs, some keywords that just pull in clicks:

The analysis of this behaviour is that there are some parts of any market that will not only trawl through ten pages of results, but also still click on them if they meet their expectations.

This is the so-called “long tail traffic”, and understanding that where today you get impressions, tomorrow you could be getting clicks can be something of a revelation.

The First Keyword Research Strategy You'll Need!

In fact, central to one of the traffic improvement modules that are used to boost results is known as Zero Traffic Keyword Fishing.

The core idea is that you can create content that has no other purpose than to get Google, via the Search Console, to suggest keywords that have audience outlier properties. To do this, all you have to do is continue to create content, and let Google index it.

Oh, and stop being obsessed with traffic...

Where the traffic improvement comes in is in leveraging something that Ted Nicholas calls “Magic Words” to improve the listing, and then checking to see if the CTR goes up. The CTR is a ratio of impressions (how many times the listing is displayed) against clicking through to your web site.

Remember that we noted that an indexed page has at least the Title and a Summary (from the Metadata) displayed in the SERPs. You can get a view of that content through SC, using the Search Appearance from the main menu.

Specifically, under HTML Improvements, Search Console can point to exactly where modifications should be made to improve performance. After all, Google wants to get your valuable information into the hands of people who will benefit from it, as much as you do!

By making sure that you get magic words* into the text you will have a material effect on the CTR. Beyond that, if you then tweak the page so that it is more relevant, and deploy social media sharing and backlink strategies you will improve SERPs, get more impressions, and, eventually, more clicks.

Just remember to play the long game: content only remains relevant for as long as it delivers value to the target audience.

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*Ted Nicholas has lists of words that improve headline performance in his books, and it would be unprofessional of me to list them all here; however, three obvious ones are: "free", "how to" and, of course, "you".