How To Come Up with Content Ideas Based on Keyword Research
Sáfár Attila
Keyword research can show you what expressions the visitors of Google use when they’d like to find information about a topic. It also informs you about the volume and frequency of the different searches.
If you’d like to drive traffic to your site with blog posts or promote your products with content marketing keyword research is one of the first things that you should do.
Studying the expressions that the visitors type into Google can be extremely useful in the following two cases:
If you’re full of great content ideas;
and if you’re not.
Let’s take a closer look at the first case.
If you know exactly what you would like to write about, keyword research will help in attracting visitors to your site.
Even if you are an expert in your topic, without research you won’t be able to tell, how the visitors search for its key phrases on Google.
It’s possible that you will only reach a small amount of your potential clients because you use a technical term instead of a regular one in the title.
And it’s also possible that your competitors will reach a larger audience, with worse posts than you could write, simply because they spent a little time on mapping the potential keywords.
Which you can avoid with research that only takes 5-10 minutes per article.
Not to mention that a deeper study will very likely give you plenty of great content ideas.
What to look for in the results?
To sum up: keyword research is about finding out how users search for a topic, that you’d like to cover.
There are two aspects of keyword research, that you should pay a close attention to if you’d like to maximize the number of visitors coming to your site from search engines.
You need to find those expressions related to your topics, that haven’t been covered by popular competitor sites and could attract a large number of visitors (or at least enough users, to make it worth writing about them).
It’s likely that achieving a good position on the search engine result pages for some of the expressions in your topic will seem inaccessible at first.
If you see a list of high-quality websites that have been around for a long time, after typing an expression on Google’s page, there’s a good chance that you will have to work very hard for a good ranking.
In this case, it could be a good idea to target long-tail keywords at first and write about longer phrases that consumers use when looking for specific pieces of information.
For example create an article about online marketing tips for beginners, instead of just online marketing.
If your posts aimed at the long tail keywords are successful, then after a while you will be able to rank well for the shorter expressions of the topic, that could generate larger traffic.
Keyword research tools
You can easily map keywords that are related to a topic with specific web applications. I’m going to introduce a few of them now.
I’m only going to write about those features of these apps, that are accessible without paying a monthly fee.
Keyword.io is a simple tool, that lists hundreds of related keywords, after you type in one. Its free version doesn’t have any other features, but you can download the keyword lists in txt file after registration.
In order to find out whether an expression is worth writing about or not, you should find out about the number of monthly searchers related to the phrase and evaluate the strength of your competition.
And this is where Keyword Explorer could help you. Besides creating a list of the related expressions, it also informs you about the search volume of a phrase and the characteristics of sites that are listed when a word is typed in.
Of course, there’s a catch. Without a subscription, you can only run two searches per day with this tool.
Ubbersuggest is a very similar tool to keywords.io with one notable difference. Here you can download the keyword lists without registration.
This application can also show you the number of monthly searches with the help of an extension, but it only provides information about queries which were made in English.
Similarly to the other applications I’ve written about, Adwords Keyword Planner also generates lists from the words that are related to an expression.
On top of that, it also shows the estimated number of searches related to an expression, and the price of advertising on a keywords’ result page.
The information this tool provides about the number of searches is not very precise if you’re not using it as an advertiser. For example, it could inform you that the number of searches in a month for a certain keyword was between 1000 and 10.000. Which is a bit vague…
Of course, if you start to advertise Keyword Planner will show you more accurate numbers.
Nonetheless, you should give it a try even if you would not like to spend money on promoting your posts, as the CPC values and the estimated search values can inform you about the competition ahead of you.
You can combine the data that you’ve collected with the different applications.
If you’d like to find out as much as you can about the keywords of a topic than for example, you can examine the most promising expressions of Ubersuggest with Adwords Keyword Explorer.
This way you can increase the likelihood of finding the words with the highest chance of success.
The most simple solution
If you wouldn’t like to spend much time on keyword research and combine the data from different tools, there’s still one thing that you could do. Just type in the title of the post that you are working on into Google.
The list that will appear after this could reveal useful information about your chosen keywords and your competition.
If the results don't describe, what you had in mind, then you probably chose the wrong world and you should look for another one.
The number of advertisements in the list will help you in evaluating the difficulty of the selected keyword. If the page is full of ads then you will have a hard time trying to rank high among the organic results.
You can collect more information about the difficulty of a keyword if you click on every link in its list. This way you can get a clearer picture of the quality of the posts that will you need to create in order to have a chance to rank high.
Finally, at the bottom of the result pages, you can often see related searches. These can give you additional content ideas.
Other tools
Besides the keyword research tools I’d also like to call your attention to a few other web applications, that can help in understanding your audience’s interests, and give you additional content ideas.
The first of these is Google’s Search Console.
If you log into the app, select Search Traffic and click on Search Analytics, you can get an overview of the keywords, that visitors use to find your site.
And by selecting the Page option here, you can also overview the destination pages on your site; the web pages where Google directs visitors when they type in a certain keyword.
In this list, you are probably going to find instances, where the landing page is not as relevant for the keyword as it could be. For example, pages, that in some aspect cover a keyword, but also cover other topics fall into this category.
It suggests that there is a content gap; the topic of the keyword is not covered on other pages or could be covered better (otherwise Google wouldn’t send traffic to an imperfect destination page).
If you cover these expressions in separate blog posts, you can improve your rankings for those words, and provide a better experience for your readers.
Unlike the tools I’ve listed BuzzSumo doesn’t inform you about keywords. It shows you the most popular posts of a topic on social media sites.
Even though this is the only feature of this app that you can use without a subscription, it could be a good idea to go through the posts that BuzzSumo suggests, before you start to write about a topic, as they could be different from the ones, that you are could with Google.
How to use the keywords?
The expressions that you collect with keyword research can give you plenty of great content ideas.
Keyword research can also help you to get to know your audience better since it will reveal the expressions that interest them in connection with a topic.
At the same time finding the right words is only one of the steps, that you’ll need to take if you’d like to acquire good positions on the search engine result pages.
You’ll need to work on on-, and off page SEO and several technical characteristics of your site as well.
You can find additional tips on these topics in the linked articles.
Following these guides can help you in reaching the right people with your content.
But going through these steps in itself won’t guarantee the success.
The best blog posts are newsworthy - or at least they are able to introduce a well-known problem from a new angle.
And you should try to find this angle, even if the only goal of your articles is to drive traffic to your website - by writing about an expression that interests a lot of visitors.