How to Decide What to Blog About: Use your highest ranking posts as your guide.

This is the fourth article in a series about how to decide what to blog about.

The first article showed you how to get blogging ideas based off of what blog posts get the most clicks to your website.

In the second article, I showed you how to get blogging ideas based off of your blog posts that appear the most in search results.

In the third article, I showed you how to get blogging ideas based off of the most attractive pages to your website visitors.

This time, I’m going to show you how to decide what to blog about using the posts and pages on your website that rank the highest in Google.

By highest ranking, I mean posts that Google gives a high ranking position to, on average, in search results. Some of the reasons I want to encourage you to use this information when deciding what to blog about are:

• Google might think you are more of an expert on topics covered in your higher-ranking posts than your lower-ranking posts. Adding more content around something that Google already gives you good traction for will likely add to your relevance in the eyes of Google, ideally leading to your site appearing more in search results.
• Might have less competition than other topics you cover in your blog. If you can write a lot of articles about something that isn’t overly saturated on the web, you are more likely to be able to corner that topic in search results more easily than more competitive topics, which can give you a tremendous edge in growing your readership.

I know I’d love to come up for super popular terms today, but the sites that come up for those terms have a huge edge on my site. They have likely been around longer, produce way more content than I can as a one-person business (many big sites have an entire staff dedicated to writing articles for them and produce many articles a week or per day), and have built up a ton of authority with Google that will take me quite some time to content with at the rate I am able to produce content for my blog.

Instead of trying to compete with online content giants right now, if I can find what Google ranks me highest for on my site, I can aim to become more of an online expert in that space. It might mean I write about some things that I didn’t envision spending a ton of time on, but to me when Google ranks me highly for an article, I see it as Google’s way of trying to give me a clue about areas online that need more information, so I’d be silly not to take their lead.

All the techniques I’ve been talking about in this series on how to decide what to blog about need you to have the same four things in place to get started:

• Google Analytics installed on your website. I show you how to do this here.
• Google Search console connected to your website. Here’s how to do it.
• Google Search console tied to your Google Analytics. I have the steps here.
• Your Google Analytics login information so you can see your site visitors’ activity.

Next, inside Google Analytics, I would like you to get to your Landing Pages section within Search Console. Search Console is within Acquisition, which you’ll find in the left-hand menu.

How to decide what to blog about:
How to use your highest-ranking posts as your guide for blogging ideas.

Once you are in Landing Pages in Search Console, you should see a table showing you pages and posts on your site. There’s a bunch of columns and one of those columns is Average Position.

Average position is where we will focus our attention today. Average position refers to the average position a blog post or web page from your site receives in search results. Here’s how it works:

• Each time a page or post is shown in a Google search result, it has a ranking. If it shows up third in organic (non-paid for) search results, it gets a ranking of 3.
• So say a page shows up first once, third once, and seventh once.
  • Google would add those ranking positions together (1+3+7 = 11) and divide by the number of times it appeared in search results (3) to get your average ranking. In this case, you’d have 11/3 = 3.66 as an average position.
• The higher the average position, the better. An average position of 1 is far better than an average position of 10.

To see which pages and blog posts have the highest average position, you just need to sort from highest to lowest average position. By default in Google Analytics, Search Console’s Landing page report will sort by Impressions first. So let’s change the report to do that. Just click the Average Position column heading twice. Why twice? The first click will sort starting with the largest number. In this case, we want the highest positions, like 1, 2, and 3, so we want the lowest numbers first, which is what that second click will get you.

How do you decide what to blog about based off of the average positions of your landing pages? Simple. Just follow these steps:

1. Go through the list, in order, and see which pages get the highest average positions.
2. As you look at what ranks the highest in Google, look for themes.
   For instance, maybe you are an aromatherapist and you’ve done a lot of reviews on essentials oils that get good rankings in search results; that’s a theme you should pay attention to when thinking about new blogging ideas.
3. Once you’ve noticed a theme that ranks well, write more blog posts about that. In our example, of essential oil reviews, you could:
   1. Do more reviews comparing the same oil from different manufacturers.
   2. You could simply just keep doing more reviews of more oils, working your way through what you use the most to the least. Add in some that you’ve heard about that you haven’t tried yet and you’ll be expanding your expertise as you work on building your relevancy in Google’s eyes at the same time.

In my next article, I’ll go into another approach to how to decide what to blog about: Writing more content based off of articles that result in more than one page being visited on your site.