How to Use Search Data to Build Killer Blog Content That Attracts Leads
Blogs have long been a key component of digital marketing strategy for brands across every industry, from consumer products and services to healthcare and technology. Blogs are a powerful tool for delivering valuable information to an audience to establish credibility and thought leadership, controlling keywords that drive traffic to a brand’s website, enhance social network engagement, upsell products or services, and much more.
In this session from our Digital Summit at Home: Content & Social conference from Feb 2021, Premier Creative’s (@PremiereWebSEO) founder and owner J.J. Abbott provides insights into best practices for deploying a successful blog strategy that relies on search data to drive meaningful business results. J.J. Abbott’s session video is above. Key ideas and tips from the session include these gems:
Gathering Ideas for Your Blog Strategy (6:00)
One of the biggest challenges that marketers face when crafting their strategy for blogging is coming up with ideas for what they should write about. Abbott advises that marketers take an analytical approach to identifying what content your audience is interested in as a starting point. Look at site metrics, competitive content, and informational opportunities to inform the topics you should be writing about.
DO THIS: Look carefully at your website analytics and see where visitors are spending most of their time to identify the types of information that your audience is most interested in.
TRY THIS: Keep an eye on what your competitors are writing about on their own blogs and social channels and find ways to put a better spin on the topic that will appeal to your joint audience.
The Power of Research (13:00)
As with most marketing practices, research is critical when it comes to determining what a brand should be blogging about. Abbott notes the following tactics that can be very useful for identifying relevant blog topics and trends:
- Analyze what other people are doing and what they are talking about
- Browse social media
- Join relevant social media groups to identify interesting topics
- Use Google Analytics to see which blogs perform well
- Take advantage of keyword research tools
- Trust Google Trends
- Identify what is trending on social media channels
- Leverage Google suggested topics
People Also Ask (PAA) (14:45)
Diving a level deeper into researching relevant blog topics, Abbott makes a strong case for taking a close look at consumer search intent on Google. Search terms are often quite broad, and Google has developed ways to predict what information the searcher is actually looking for and recommends suggestions for what “People Also Ask” with the goal of delivering relevant information.
These questions are designed to address the intent of the search, and PAA provides a wealth of insight that can help inform the topics you should be blogging about.
PRO TIP: Spend some time using Google to test out broad search terms that are relevant to your industry and track what PAA recommendations Google makes to gather ideas for content that is relevant to your audience to better connect with them.
Develop a PAA-driven Blog Outline & Structure (18:45)
The first step to a sound blog strategy is to develop an outline for how frequently you plan on posting blogs. Once this is decided, it’s time to focus on the structure of the blogs, which includes everything from the length of the article, included written and visual elements, headers, tone, and more. Abbott walks through each of these in detail in this session.
PRO TIP: Create an airtight process for the frequency of your posts and maintain a consistent structural format for your blogs to deliver information on the most impactful way.
Be sure to use powerful headers in each blog for SEO purposes and include captivating visuals to draw the reader in even further.
Identifying blog topics shouldn’t feel like a chore. By following Abbott’s approach that relies on search data and other research elements, much of the burden can be relieved and you will have more bandwidth to focus on creating quality content.
To hear from experts like J.J. on the regular, check out an upcoming Digital Summit event — including our upcoming Digital Summit at Home: B2B virtual conference May 25-27. Three days of game-changing B2B marketing workshops, sessions, and keynotes!