This is the second in a series about how to decide what to blog about. In the last article, I showed you how to get ideas based off of what gets your website clicks. This time, I’m going to show you how to get blogging ideas based off of what people want and searching for on the internet, whether you are getting clicks for those topics right now or not.
I like using this approach because it gives me a read on where trends are based on the content I already write about on my blog or website. Knowing this allows me to dig deeper into topics and share more. This makes my site more well-rounded for my readers and usually makes me grow in my knowledge as well.
All the techniques I’ve been talking about lately need you to have the same four things in place to get started:
- Google Analytics installed in 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:
Write more about what your site shows up for the most in search engines because that’s a big clue about what people want to know.
Once you are in Landing Pages in Search Console, you should see that the table of data is sorted by Impressions by default.
In this case, Impressions means how many times a page or blog post on your website appeared in search engine listings.
The more your impressions a particular landing page has had (and every page or post on your website can serve as a landing page), the more you can assume two things:
- People are searching for information related to what is in that blog post or website page.
- Google thinks your blog post or page is worth showing to searchers.
How do you decide what to blog about based off of impressions of your landing pages? Simple. Go through the list, in order, and see if there are pages or a subject matter that gets a lot of impressions. Then ask yourself if you have more to add to the topic than you’ve already provided on your site. If you do, write more blog posts around that topic.
Here’s an example about how to decide what to blog about using impressions:
Maybe you have a lot of impressions for “dog leash prices.”
Google likes it when there’s an expert on a topic. If you already have a blog post or many blog posts about a topic that Google is showing in search results, flesh out your expertise more. In the case of dog leash prices, you could write more articles related to dog leashes like:
- A blog post about each brand of dog leash you like and why, one post per brand
- A blog post about each type of dog leash, one post per type
- Different types of dog training that include the use of a dog leash
- When not to use a dog leash in training
- How not to use a dog leash in dog training
- Trends in dog leash designs
Fleshing out your blog with a ton of details about dog leashes makes you more of an expert on the topic and provides an excellent resource for your website’s visitors. So this is a win-win. You will be able to help the people you serve because you’ve gained knowledge and people online can rely on you for your expertise whenever they need advice about dog leashes.
If Google likes what you have to say, you will probably get more impressions than before because it will probably start showing your new dog leash blog posts and, while it isn’t guaranteed by any stretch, it’s more likely that your blog posts about dog leashes will appear in search results because you have already established you know something about them to Google with your previous posts. This is because your history about a particular topic helps Google when evaluating how relevant and valuable your new blog posts are.
If you see that a certain theme of blog posts or website pages aren’t getting a lot of impressions, you might want to put those ideas aside for now or slowly work on adding related content over time while focusing heavily on producing more content about the topics that are already getting more impressions right now.
In my next article, I’ll go into another approach to how to decide what to blog about: Writing more content based off of your most popular posts and pages.
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