Well-researched blogs help your website gain more visibility online.
Naturally, you’ll be looking for ways to attract your target audience if your blogs haven’t been driving traffic and generating leads as they should be. Many online resources recommend that you search social media, send polls, and use online blog topic generators to find ideas for your next blogs. However, these methods have one major drawback—they lack data to prove overall audience interest and only result in unmethodical and ineffective insights.
When faced with such odds, how will you find the best blog topics and ideas capable of attracting and engaging with your target audience? One obvious answer is researching the world wide web. This method may seem time-consuming, but researching fresh and relevant blog topics is crucial in creating content that drives traffic and supports your marketing goals.
Researching for topics, however, isn’t just about typing a few words on search engines and clicking on random websites on the results pages. If you want to ensure that your blog post will successfully reach a large portion of your target audience, you will need a strategy. Let’s get straight to our comprehensive workflow and tips on finding blog topics that will lead your business to success.
Why Blog Research Is Crucial
Writing posts that rank high and give readers the most relevant information is only possible if you do your research. When you conduct research, it means you have allotted time to find essential points that will support your idea. Researching is crucial before writing your blog because:
- it boosts your credibility and trustworthiness;
- it improves your writing speed since the blog ideas have already been laid out; and
- it fuels more ideas for your future content.
How to Find Blog Topics
Blogs are the life of your website as they are the content that drives traffic and establishes your brand’s credibility. However, writing engaging content is not easy unless you have an interesting topic to write about. In the same way, it can be challenging to decide what you should write and what information will appeal to your audience. You will probably spend more time deciding on topics to focus on than on writing.
To get you started, here are some helpful ways to research blog topics that can drive more visitors to your website, build a long-lasting connection with your current and potential customers, as well as answer their questions:
1. Define your goals.
When you’re passionate about a specific subject, it can be easy to get lost in the mountains of information, so it’s vital to have a clear and concise goal in mind.
You can ask these questions to set clear goals when you research content ideas:
- What makes your blog relevant?
- Which area of your business do you want to improve through your blog?
- What is your expected audience’s response after reading your content?
It would be best to research blog topics that fit into your overall digital strategy. The purpose of your blog could be:
- attracting high-quality traffic;
- generating leads;
- boosting conversions; and
- educating customers about your products
While your readers won’t always buy your products or services, knowing what they need can help you tailor content that will gain more online interest.
2. Explore your blog ideas.
After setting your goals, it’s time to research blog topics. Research is all about exploring your ideas by asking relevant questions and finding answers to those questions. You can ask your colleagues about the topics relevant to your industry. You can also try other ways to look for blog topics. Doing these things gives you unique content ideas.
3. Specify your topic.
Once you capture the whole picture of your blog, you can list potential topics based on your research and determine which one fits your content strategy. Your blog topics can be related to your industry, customers’ problems, or products and services.
4. Analyze your competitors.
One of the reasons you need to analyze your competitors is to spot any missing points. You can review your competitors’ blogs and social media profiles and find topic areas you missed because they are approached from a completely different perspective. Some of the methods to review your market competition include:
Searching Keywords of Competitors
Research blog topics shared by your indirect and direct competitors. Remember that blogs of other industries can still be your competitor, even though they don’t sell the same product as yours. If you want to draw organic traffic to topics relevant to your audience, it’s essential to keep an eye out for them.
To find out their primary focus, start by looking at your competitors’ blogs. Make sure to look at tags and filter them to find the most popular categories on their blogs. These tags and categories could be your competitors’ pillar topics. If they align with your content strategy, you might want to consider adding them to your plan.
Conducting Keyword Research on Competitors
You will need to conduct competitive keyword research to identify gaps in your strategy. This can be done using online analytic tools that analyze keywords for your competitors’ domain (entire website) and subdomain (blog section).
Researching Trending Topics
You will also need reliable tools to help you identify organic trends that interest your audience. Google and other search engines play a significant role in identifying what people currently search for online, thanks to the autocomplete feature.
5. Create an outline.
The common mistake writers make when creating articles is trying to include all the information they find online. While search engines appreciate long blogs, squeezing in every bit of information about a certain topic makes your article difficult to read and understand. You can organize your research findings by removing unnecessary points and focusing on the most relevant resources through an outline. A solid outline will contain your blog’s main idea, points that need to be included, and supporting ideas for each point.
Best Topic Research Tools
Here are some research tools that give instant ideas so you do not have to spend too much time searching the web for blog topics:
1. SemRush
While SEMRush is popularly used to perform keyword research, check how your blog posts rank, competitor research, and many other tasks, it can also be used to quickly research blog topic ideas. You can use SEMRush’s Topic Research Tool to enter a topic and get tons of ideas and information relevant to it.
2. Ahrefs
Ahrefs, another premium SEO tool, allows you to track and optimize search engine rankings. It includes features, such as Site Explorer and Keyword Explorer. You can use the Content Explorer feature to search for blog topic ideas. Enter a topic idea in the search field and let the feature analyze and find the best-performing content related to your chosen topic.
You can sort the results and look into the details, such as the word count, links, and organic keywords. These insights will allow you to improve your blogging strategy and create content superior to your competitors’.
3. Google Trends
Google Trends is an accessible data exploration tool that analyses the popularity of search terms on Google. It tells you which search terms are most popular in different regions, languages, and periods, so you can use it to determine what is trending within your industry and location. You can even use it to compare search terms.
Google Trends is a great place to start if you’re interested in writing about seasonal topics. It provides valuable insight into what people are looking for and which trends they are currently interested in.
4. HubSpot Blog Ideas Generator
HubSpot Blog Ideas Generator instantly generates blog topic ideas. After typing a keyword on the search bar, the platform will send you a week’s worth of potential blog post ideas with headlines that are likely to rank well on search results. You may need to register to receive a year’s worth of blog post ideas from this blog topic generator.
Start Publishing Engaging Content Today
At Advanced Digital Media Services, our ultimate goal is to give your readers the best resources to help them recognize and trust your brand. We make this possible through in-depth blog research, competitor analysis, and keyword research. If you want to grow your organic traffic and boost your website’s performance, contact our team today and learn more about our Cleveland SEO services.
