Keyword research for blog post ideas

Part of the skill of being a blogger is getting noticed. Anyone can create content all day long and post it, but if it isn’t on trend or getting picked up, it’s being wasted. Poorly targeted content has minimal SEO impact. The real power of a blog is when people pick it up and run with it. Only then can your job as a blog writer be considered done.

So how do you do that?

Most blogs will have an established niche, so the hard work is already done. What comes next is a bit of research.

Keyword research

If you have been writing for the web for any length of time, you will already know about keyword research. Mainly in context of being provided with a list of keywords to shoehorn into a blog post or article you’re writing for a client. This is slightly different. We will be performing keyword research for subjects rather than the keywords themselves.

For example, I run a road cycling website called roadcyclist.co.uk so I’ll use that to demonstrate. Use your keyword tool of choice, I use SEOchat.com but there are lots of others. Enter the keywords of your niche into the query phrase box and search. I used ‘road cycling’ as that’s my niche.

What results is a page full of keywords like in the image above. It shows you what people are searching for which is a lot of fodder for your blog posts. In my cycling example, you can see people searching for road cycling shoes, road cycling gloves, road cycling technique and road cycling tips. Plus hundreds of other terms. Many of the results won’t be of any use, but many will be.

These are the basis for your content schedule but not all of it. From your list, you can then drill down into each a step further and find out exactly what about road cycling shoes people are looking for. We get results such as best road cycling shoes, road cycling shoes reviews, road cycling shoes wide feet, road cycling shoes women’s, road cycling shoes you can walk in, road cycling shoes 2016 and many more.

You can repeat this for all your keyword terms should you wish. As a result, you get hundreds of potential subjects for blog posts. While some, such as reviews should be formulaic while still interesting a lot of fun can be had with some of the others. If you’re imaginative, you can come up with a range of subjects to keep your readers interested.

Linking loveliness

Once you have a well-written post on a timely subject, you can do another search on that subject to see who else is writing about it. Then it’s time to reach out to see if they will link to it. The more timely your post, the more chance you have of getting a link to it. While backlinks themselves now have a negligible effect on SEO, they can bring traffic with them, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The beauty of using keyword research to generate blog post ideas is that it delivers for everyone. You get to build a content schedule that can be planned long in advance. You or your client gets a series of popular posts on current trends and the audience gets exactly the kind of information they are searching for. As long as the posts deliver on their promises, everyone’s a winner!