How often do you feel stuck when trying to write a blog post or wonder what topics to write about? I hope this simple guide will help you generate fresh content ideas and topics your audience will love to read.

Writing content with user-intent in mind can improve your website visitor engagement, website traffic, and boosts chances to convert visitors to qualified leads.

Follow these simple strategies

 

Know who your buyer persona is

Before anything else you need to identify who you are writing for, in other words, your buyer persona. This is a good chance for you to think about who your ideal customer is, what do they like and what some of their pain points. Our friend and business coach Kelsey Reidl wrote a post with some useful tips on how to discover your target market. I recommend you check it out here

For example, my ideal customer is someone who runs a small business, an entrepreneur who is a master of their craft but needs help with search engine marketing and online visibility, or simply website content restructuring. Some of the questions I get asked often are:

 

• How do I choose the right SEO strategy for my business?
• How do I do SEO for my business?
• How do I know what keywords to use on my website?

These questions are excellent pointers for me to write interesting content that will help my audience with questions they have. All this helps me understand a bit more about my ideal customer who is an Entrepreneur who runs many aspects of their business or small business owners who do not have enough resources and need help with online marketing and SEO.

This gets me thinking about more specific questions entrepreneurs or small business owners would ask and how I can write articles to help them out. So, this would a good starting point to research topics that would interest your ideal customers.

 

Topic Research with SEO in mind

For every piece of content, and blog post you write you should think about ranking for new keywords or topics. That starts by identifying certain target keywords then writing a post around them.

A great exercise here to identify target keywords is to learn about what your customers are doing online, what are they searching? How about what keywords your competition is ranking for! By doing such analysis we can generate a list of over 1000 keywords you can target.

How do I do this?

By using a competitive gap analysis tool to find out companies like yours who share the same customers or competitors who are generating quality content. The gap analysis tool allows you to see where you are being outperformed by your competition so you can focus more on that specific area

 

With this tool we can get a list of top keywords your competitors are ranking for and that you are not. Then we filter this list further by removing the keywords that are too difficult or have low search volume. After that, we look at what piece of content ranks high for a specific keyword and aim at writing a better blog post around it.

Another method you can use is Google Keyword Planner a handy, free and wonderful tool that helps you discover new keywords, search volume and forecasts.

 

Use Answer the Public to find out what questions customers are asking

Writing articles and blog posts is a great opportunity to answer any questions your audience may be asking online.

Using Answer the Public you can input a target keyword and generate a whole list of most asked questions online. This is a fantastic way to generate content ideas knowing all kinds of questions people are asking.

 

For example, if you are looking to write a blog post about headshot photographer and figure out ways to make the article more appealing to your audience, go to answer the public and type in the keyword headshot photographer in the keyword search box. after clicking on Get Questions, the website will give you a series of results. You can click on each result to find new topic ideas your audience will love to read.

 

Find hot industry topics and blog ideas

Some other great tools to find out what is trending in your industry and the hot topics being discussed online are;

Reddit – Great tool to find ideas for blog posts for a few reasons:

 

• They have a subreddit which is an awesome place to participate in discussions and engage with your niche
• Active users who always vote on what they care
• Always find trending topics
• Easy to find popular topics by using the available now, month year filters
• The comments section is a goldmine
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• It is also important to know what style of blog posts you are going to write. We gathered some useful blog post ideas from the Hoth
• Posts with useful lists from your favourite niche
• How to or DIY Posts
• Case Study Posts
• Problem/Solution Posts
• Frequently Asked Questions Posts
• YouTube video cut-up Posts
• Research Posts
• Checklist Posts
• Statistical Posts
• Interview Posts
• Weekly Pick Posts
• Narrative Posts
• Satirical Posts
• Review Posts
• Survey Posts
• News Update Posts
• Personal Experience Posts
• Prediction Posts
• Reaction Posts
• Behind the Scenes Posts
• Holiday Posts
• Fashion Posts

By doing topic research related to your niche, using specific locations and keywords you should be able to find out what is popular in your industry, what your customers are talking about, the problems they are facing and questions they are asking.

Have any questions or comments! I would love to hear from you and help you with your SEO projects.