Marketeers in modern businesses are often reiterating the need to ‘produce content’ to boost visibility and help their SEO (often an ambiguous acronym).
In this article, I will explain not only the importance of creating content, but how to do it properly through use of both keyword and topic research.
This will help you develop content which is aligned to both marketing and business objectives.
I’ll complete this by breaking it down into the following sections:
Why is creating content so important?
Ever since the continuous growth in influence of the digital marketplace and search engines, the digital evolution has forced marketeers to adapt.
Nowadays, the main mantra an SEO agency will repeat is the following phrase of ‘content is king’.
Well, if content truly is king, how do you go from your starting block to the coronation with a list of relevant content ideas?
Know Your Customer Profiles
Like all marketing done right, it comes down to understanding your customer.
Developing an understanding and blueprint of your key target audience can massively help you identify relevant content gaps that help meet their needs at different points in the customer journey.
In marketing these are called ‘personas’.
Completing a persona analysis requires both quantitative and qualitative insight from valued stakeholders both inside and outside your business.
For example, Google Analytics offers you the ability to quickly narrow down who your main purchasers are (if you run an ecommerce website) with very accurate quantitative metrics.
You can supplement the quantitative data further by sending out targeted questionnaires to both internal and external stakeholders.
Use these questionnaires to better understand your customers motivations, interests, frustrations, hobbies, buying process and user journeys.
Combining this information with Google Analytics demographics, geographics, psychographics and behavioural data builds a full picture of the customer.
Why Create Content for Key Personas?
Once you’ve done your homework on your business’s target audiences, it’s time to look at what information they are interested in and how you can create this for them that also aligns to your business objectives.
If you take this article as an example, I’m using my personas to answer user queries on keyword and topic research.
I’ve identified that my target audience requires digital marketing information that supports their content marketing efforts and building blocks for effective SEO.
The likelihood is that if I can produce quality content that answers these queries, I rank higher and gain more visibility for my expertise and services offered over time.
Without understanding my target audience and developing blueprint personas I may as well have spent my time producing content, blog posts and articles on information that is not valuable and not searched for by my target audience. What would be the point in that?!
How to complete Topic Research
Once you’ve done the groundwork building key personas you can start to quickly brainstorm the key topic areas you think will be of interest to them.
Brainstorming
Like the classic way you’d develop ideas in school, simply use your persona information as a reference point and start brainstorming.
Brainstorming potential key areas of interest can be an incredibly useful exercise to complete.
For example, if I provide digital marketing services, I can be pretty confident that my target audience is interested in hearing about one of the following topics:
- Content Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Email Marketing
- SEO
- Mobile Marketing
- Digital Marketing Analytics
- Marketing Strategy
- Brand Development
- Marketing Design
Quite quickly you’re able to build up a list of potential topics of interest you believe will be useful and relevant to your target audience.
Now, at this point you won’t have done your homework to ensure that these topics are ALL useful to your target audience (e.g. do they search for them!?).
To complete this robustly you’ll have to use a couple of tools. Here’s my favourite ‘go to’ tools for topic research:
Google Trends
Google Trends is a great tool for 2 main reasons:
- It’s free AND simple to use
- It pulls data directly from Google Search – the main source of information you need!
Once you land on the homepage you can simply enter in your topic and press enter.
Google will automatically retrieve all relevant data on this within the US for the past 12 months.
However, should you be targeting users in other countries such as the UK, you can change the country easily with the top left filter (under your topic entered).
You can also change the time length, the category and the search type.
The part I’d consider the most important is the ‘category’. By altering this to one which is relevant to you (e.g. ‘Marketing Services’) you are filtering potential traffic noise out of the data that’s actually useful to your purposes.
This will remove users who are searching for your topic for other reasons.
For example, users searching for ‘Digital Marketing’ may be looking at courses or books to purchase which isn’t relevant to you and distorts your data.
Google Trends also offers further information to help marketers which includes the following: related topics, related queries and greater regional depth (e.g. city level).
Using your persona information you should be able to both test you original topic brainstorm against information gathered as well as gain further relevant topics to research.
Another great thing about Google Trends is that you can also identify seasonality.
For instance, the chart above shows interest (search numbers) for your topic over a specified period of time, and spikes indicate when that topic is of most interest.
If I notice at certain times of year there are spikes in traffic for ‘SEO Marketing Services’ (e.g. due to regular Google algorithm updates) I can plan my promotions and content strategy accordingly.
You can then also use this information to target when to produce content, and also help any ad campaigns!
SEMrush
SEMrush is a great tool for covering the broad spectrum of SEO – I especially like it as a keyword research tool.
It has a nice feature within it’s Content Marketing Toolkit called ‘Topic Research’. Just like with Google Trends, all you have to do is enter your brainstormed topics, filter by region and languages and press enter.
This will bring a whole host of relevant topics to write about, as well as allowing you to save content options into ‘favourite ideas’ for further review later.
The breakdown from SEMrush goes into much further detail than Google Trends by showing volume of search, difficulty to rank, as well as key headlines and questions to target or include and related searches.
SEMrush also offers further help with the in-built SEO Content Template.
This allows you to select identified content types you want to write about and get further insight into what’s required to rank well in search results.
This information includes target keywords, a target word count, competitor analysis AND backlinks (or ‘inbound links’) you should target.
The downside is you’ll probably have to buy a premium account to get greater access to all of these features in SEMrush.
But, if you’re able to combine persona information and topic brainstorms for more effective targeting it can massively help your business by focusing on content production that’s both useful and relevant to your target audience.
How to complete Keyword Research
Once you’ve completed your persona development and made a list of relevant topics to write about, it’s time to go a little deeper and conduct keyword research.
You essentially want to fill in your topic buckets with keywords and target them in various pieces of content with robust content structures mapped out.
Informational vs Action Keywords
You’ll often have different motivations for different target keywords. For instance, you may be targeting shorter terms related to your business to help drive a greater level of brand awareness.
This could be something like ‘How to create value through social media’ for users after more informational searches.
However, at the same time you might be targeting other pieces of content at keywords which are action related such as ‘Technical SEO Services to increase site speed’.
Both of these two target keyword phrases is what are known as long tail keywords.
These are often more specific search terms with smaller search volumes but offer more commercial value to businesses (e.g. more specific and higher intent searches) – at other times they can just be very specific informational searches.
The idea is that when users are at this stage of the sales funnel they’ve done most of their ‘informational’ research and are looking to complete an ‘action’.
Keyword research is essential to identifying and categorising both of these types of target keywords.
Organising and Structuring Keywords
Once you know your products or service offerings, their categories and the wider topics of your business you then want to utilise a research tool.
As mentioned earlier, I’m a big fan of SEMrush who offer a ‘Keyword Magic Tool’ as well. This tool helps you to search for keywords and pull information on similar phrases, search volumes and difficulty to rank.
On most occasions if you’ve completed the preceding steps correctly you should have a mixture of exact, broad and phrase keywords uncovered.
I often find it’s easier to manage these lists by topic categories by extracting the data into excel and dumping them into a single spreadsheet.
It’s a bit of a manual process from here on in where you’ll identify all relevant keywords and whether they’re action or informational related – go through them line by line and assess the user intent accordingly.
I’d also suggest you structure them into exact, broad or phrase matches, which will help you with any Google Ads you might want to set up in the future.
Another step in this manual process is also finding and categorising any ‘negative keywords’.
Negative keywords are words that are not relevant to what you’re targeting.
For example, if you are targeting the keyword ‘SEO Services’’ you don’t want to rank for ‘free SEO Services’ as this is not what you offer.
Again, this is directed more at Google Ads but it is worth completing as part of the wider research.
Google Keyword Planner is another tool to use. The main reason I focus on SEMrush is the extra detail it gives you when completing keyword research.
Google Keyword Planner however is a free tool within the Google Ads software but is not fully transparent with search volume figures unless you’ve already invested a great deal of money with them.
Instead of giving exact numbers it categorises search volumes into less precise metrics (e.g. 1K – 10K). It is less detailed than SEMrush without high levels of investment.
However, Google Keyword Planner is good for conducting top level keyword research in a similar way to SEMrush.
It gives the added benefit of allowing you to find the higher costing search terms.
You can use this as an indication of value each keyword offers.
For example, if someone is willing to pay higher for certain terms you can bet it brings in higher commercial value.
This is another thing to monitor when conducting keyword research for supporting future search ads you might want to set up.
Once you’re confident you’ve identified and refined all the relevant keywords for your business, you can add these to the SEMrush keyword analyser.
This will help you track your performance for ranking for these keywords over time.
Remember it’s a marathon, not a sprint in content marketing and you won’t rank for new keywords overnight.
Often the process can take up to 6 months to see the impact of your hard work!
Often people are a little unsure of what keywords their site realistically can and can’t rank for.
My advice is if you have a domain authority of c40 or less, you should use the advanced filters on SEMrush to filter keyword difficulty to 60 KD% or below.
A good trick when you’re first starting out is to focus on lower volume longer-tail keywords.
This will help your content rank higher and gain visibility faster. This smaller traffic volume will in turn will also help your overall domain build authority more quickly and allow you to target more competitive keywords faster – link building becomes an incredibly important element here also.
Once you’ve managed to extract all your keywords into a single spreadsheet and manually go through the relevant terms for your topics you’re almost set to start writing!
Your next challenge will then be ensuring you are ticking the right boxes to write high quality content for SEO.
Conclusion
It’s important for all digital marketers these days to follow these simple steps to identify customer personas, topics and then fill those topics with relevant keywords.
Depending on the breadth of your products and services, this can take time to do. The benefits are worth it in the long-run with more impactful and strategic content marketing.
Carrying out effective keyword and topic research is vital to delivering value through well researched content marketing. Giving real value to your customers is what will set you apart from your competitors.
