If you’ve ever wondered how to choose a topic for your blog, you’re reading the right article. Today, I will show you how to come up with a killer list of blog topic ideas.
Not only will you learn how to find blog topics, I will show you how to use those blog topics for awesome SEO keyword research.
How to find blog topics
We’ve all been there. You sit down to write a blog post but you don’t know what to write. This is worse than writer’s block because you don’t even have a topic! I’m going to help you fix this issue.
Here are some great ways to come up with some killer blog topics:
- Identify your ideal reader or customer and speak to their interests
- Develop a customer journey and topics that guide potential customers along the journey
- Study what your competitors and similar blogs are publishing
- Answer questions that your customers typically have
- Do a topic brainstorm
Bonus tip: You can crack the code for how to find trending blog topics by spending a few minutes every day seeing what’s trending on Twitter and LinkedIn!
Bonus bonus tip: Don’t forget about updating your older content…especially if the article’s ranking is starting to slip.
The best blog topics connect with your readers’ interests. The goal is to come up with enough topics (three to six months worth) to keep you busy so that you won’t have to scramble to find something to write about.
What are SEO keywords?
SEO keywords are a series of words that you include in your articles and web copy that help your website get found when people search for related terms in search engines. While links point to the quality of a website, keywords and search queries are the fuel for search engine optimization.
Long-tail keywords
Long-tail keywords are typically longer than two words and are more specific than one or two-word head terms. Some long-tail keywords have a longer tail in terms of relevance and ranking stickiness because of reduced competition. The cool thing is that you can still have high demand blog topics that are supported by long-tail keywords.
If you have a new blog or website, you will want to turn your blog topic ideas into long-tail keywords because they’re easy to rank for. Also, in terms of getting closer to conversions, visitors are more likely to search with queries that include long-tail keywords because they are more specific. Therefore, you should use long-tail keywords in your articles and on your pages where you’d like to get the visitor to convert in some way (buy, download, sign up).
Here are some examples of long-tail keywords for various blog niches:
Food: best southern pecan pie recipe
Travel: cheap vacation spots in California
Sports: best youth baseball glove
Parenting: how to parent children with ADHD
As you can see, these long-tail keywords are indeed long. They could be even longer, but you don’t want to get too specific because you want to target phrases that people actually search!
Okay, that’s enough about long-tail keywords. We will get back to them later in the article. For now, let’s talk about shorter head terms.
How to turn blog topics into keywords
Let’s get to the nitty-gritty. Now it’s time to turn your blog topic ideas into keywords that will optimize your content. Don’t skip any steps. Trusting the process will yield good results.
Write a list of head terms
First, you should pull the major words or head terms out of your blog topic ideas and note them in a spreadsheet or document. Keep your list of head terms nearby because you will need them to do keyword research.
Here are some examples of head terms from various industries:
Automotive: sports car
Food: cupcake recipe
Financial Services: household budget
Travel: cheap trips
Sports: baseball glove
Notice that these head terms are very short (1-2 words) and to the point. Don’t try to optimize your blog content for head terms (unless you have a very popular website). Head terms like the ones above are hard to rank for because of their general nature and high competition. But not to worry, you will put these terms to use in your keyword research.
Do SEO keyword research
Next, take your blog topic ideas and use them to do keyword research. Don’t skip this important step. It will be tempting to just start writing without doing proper research, but that could lead to your content not being ranked and found!
Here is a nifty list of benefits of SEO keyword research:
- You will stop wasting time writing articles that have no chance of ranking.
- You will have a more organized and prioritized content calendar.
- Your content will be more focused and helpful.
- Your Google page rank position will improve over time.
- You will get more conversions (sales!) on your website.
- You will learn your competitors’ blog topics and keywords.
- Your positive results will motivate you to publish more good content.
The following instructions will be for using the SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool for finding great keywords for your blog articles. If you don’t have SEMrush (this link will give you an extended free trial for being a friend of our blog), I highly recommend it.
Simply type one of the head terms from the previous step into the “Enter keyword” window.
Use the “Include keywords” advanced filter to add buyer or conversion intent words like “best” or “cheap” to your preferences for the head term/keyword.
The following results appear after I add the words “best” and “gluten free” to the included keywords for the “cupcake recipe” head term keyword search:
From there, you collect your data from SEMrush, and come up with SEMrush topic clusters in a separate file for you to build off of. Pretty cool, right? You’re now armed with several long-tail keywords to build your blog article(s) around! Doing SEMrush keyword research is just that simple. If you want deeper guidance on the process, read our SEMrush keyword research tutorial.
Good keywords lead people to solutions for their problems. Remember this for your future keyword research tasks.
Power tip: Don’t forget to use free keyword research tools and resources, like Google search autocomplete, to find awesome keywords for your blogging and content marketing efforts.
In Conclusion
As you can see…turning blog topic ideas into long-tail keywords is a tight process. Similar to the 3×3 writing process, the more you do it, the better you’ll get at it. You won’t need to depend on a faulty blog topic generator to develop blog title ideas.
So keep at it and let us know if our team at InspireFirst can help you in any way.
