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3 Steps to Identify Blog Topics that are Relevant to Your Audience

Posted by Aleyda

If you’re reading this post right now, chances are that you have experienced this (or know someone who has): You have the deadline of a blog post coming, but you still don’t know what to write about.

Sometimes you get away by writing about breaking news or a trend in your field, by doing a review of a new product or service, or by covering a recent conference or meetup that you have attended, but you can’t do this all the time. You also want to write about something that is not only useful but also attractive, something that allows you to connect with your audience.

And you might be an experienced blogger, copywriter, or marketer. You might also know your audience pretty well; you have built your personas, completed and developed keyword research, and have already tried some techniques to get through the “writer’s block.” You have browsed through the content of prolific creators to get inspired and even tried Portent’s content idea generator, but you still have a hard time finding a relevant and exciting blog post idea each time that your deadline approaches.

This likely happens because although you know where to find the data—and might even have it already—to get you inspired and identify ideas, the hardest part is to make it actionable, since it’s so easy to get lost in such a vast amount of information.

What you need in order to identify blog post ideas that will allow you to connect with your audience is an actionable and simple process that is easily repeatable, applicable to any industry, and scalable:


blog-idea-process.png

Step 1: Gather the relevant data

How can we avoid getting lost when there’s so much data available through so many sources? By focusing only on gathering the most important data that’s relevant to your goal: Identifying a relevant and attractive blog post idea for your web audience.

Here’s the data that you will need:

1. Your own most popular posts

You don’t need to go through all of your previous posts, just select the most popular ones:

  • Most visited posts on your blog: Use Google Analytics to identify those blog posts that have had the highest amount of visits, the most valuable visits (those that generated the highest amount of conversions) and the most engaged visits (those that had the highest duration and generated more pageviews on the blog). Keep only the top 20% of them.

  • Most shared posts on social networks: Use SocialCrawlytics to crawl your blog and see which are the posts that have been shared the most by your visitors in their favorite social networks. Again, only keep the top 20% of them.


social-crawlytics-most-shared-pages.png

After gathering the data, consolidate these two “Top 20%” lists, eliminate the duplicates, and create a spreadsheet with the following information for each post:

  • Title
  • URL
  • Visits
  • Conversions
  • Visit duration
  • Shares in each social network (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.)

Now you know which of the posts has been, until now, your own most popular content. You know what has attracted better traffic and visibility in social networks, and the social networks that your audience prefers.

2. Your competitors’ most popular posts

It’s time to collect the most popular posts from your competitors, and although you don’t likely have access to their full analytics, you can still identify some important statistics:

  • Most shared posts on social networks: Crawl their blogs with SocialCrawlytics as you did before.
  • Most externally linked posts: With Open Site Explorer, check to see which posts have earned the highest amount of links from other sites.

With this information you can consolidate these two lists into one and create a spreadsheet for the top 20% of posts by your competitors that includes the following data:

  • Title
  • URL
  • Shares in each social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.)
  • External links
  • Linking domains

Here you have another very valuable and highly targeted source of information:
The most popular blog posts of your competitors!

3. Your community’s and influencers’ most shared content

Besides your own top content and that of your competitors, you can also identify which content is most liked in your own social communities—the different groups that are connected to each other and form your audience.

For Twitter, you can get your communities and the influencers, topics, and locations per communities by using Tribalytics, just by adding your Twitter handle:


Once you identify your different communities, their most popular topics, and influencers, you can get even more specific by using Twtrland to obtain the most popular tweets for your influencers:

Create a list with the top content shared in your influencers’ top tweets and segment it using the different topic areas identified for your communities. Complete it with social and search popularity-related data for each one of them:

  • Title
  • URL
  • Shares in each social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.)
  • External links
  • Linking domains

Here’s another very relevant input for your blog post ideas: The content that your influencers like to share and that has been popular in your own Twitter communities.

4. The hottest relevant content in social networks

After having identified the posts topics and pieces that have performed better for you, your competitors, and in your social communities in the past, you can identify which have been the overall most popular pieces of content in social networks about those same topics in the latest times.

Organize the best-performing content that you have now into different topics categories or areas and use Buzzsumo to search for them.


Download the most shared content in social networks for each category. You will have a list with the following information:

  • Title
  • URL
  • Shares in each social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.)
  • Content type

Consolidate the lists, segmenting again per category and organize it by prioritizing the overall best performing content for your topics in social networks.

5. Your relevant web industry questions

Another very relevant source of blog post ideas is the questions asked by your online community in social networks, such as Twitter, and on sites like Quora.

Go to your relevant topic’s questions, and create a list with the highest-voted questions. Automate this process by creating an IFTTT recipe for their RSS feeds, by adding them directly into a Google Docs Spreadsheet.


You can complete the previous list of questions with the ones that users make directly in Google by using the SEOchat related keywords tool, a multi-level suggestion keyword finder that will give you the queries that your audience searches for in Google about your desired topics.


By doing this, you will learn which are the biggest questions that people ask on the web about your relevant topics. A direct source of ideas to create posts that answer them.

6. Your industry web content requests

Subscribe to HARO or ProfNet and get daily email alerts each time a media outlet asks for the input of a specialist about your selected categories of content. Create filters to apply a label to those emails that specifically include one of your relevant content topics:


By doing this you will learn how journalists are looking to cover these topics and the type of content they’re writing about them already. This can serve as an ongoing reference for content ideas: See what important sites are writing about your relevant topics at the moment.

Step 2: Ask the relevant questions

Once you have gathered all the previous data you will have a very complete, but still manageable, prioritized and categorized source of potential blog post ideas from different type of sources:


Analyze and make this data actionable with the next steps:

  1. Ask yourself which are the characteristics that differentiate this top content and questions? What do they all have in common? From the areas where they are focused to the style or format, identify the patterns that they follow and make a list of criteria with them.
  2. Create a list of potentially attractive posts ideas by taking as an input the already existing popular content, questions and requests that you have identified before, applying the criteria that you have identified that they all share.
    • Specifically ask the five Ws (who, what, when, where, why) and “how” for the potential topics, thinking on how these will target your audience needs and emotions.
    • Classify each idea with a level of “interest” based on how relevant is for your audience and the amount of search volume that exists around each topic (you can validate the keyword planner information with those of SearchMetrics and SEMRush).
  3. Search and identify which of these post ideas have been already covered, whether by you, your competitors, or any other site in the past. See which sites have published the posts and the degree of success they had with them. It’s also important that you specify in which content format (text, infographic, video, checklist, slides, etc.) and type (guide, news, review, webinar, report, competition, etc.) they have been published, as well as when they were published (since it’s not the same to have been covered five years ago than just a couple of months before).
By following these steps you will have a list of blog posts ideas with this information:
  • The blog post idea
  • Interest
    • Search volume
    • Relevance level
  • Coverage status
    • Publication URL
    • Content format
    • Content type
    • Publication date
    • Shares in each social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.)
    • External links
    • Linking domains

Prioritize those ideas that have the highest level of interest and that haven’t been published yet.

Step 3: Identify your blog post opportunities

For each of the highly prioritized potential ideas for posts, ask the following questions to filter them further and validate your opportunities:

  • Is this topic related to your business’s vision and goal?
  • Is this the type of post content that is really interesting and useful for your audience?
  • Is it clear how the post will help your audience solve an issue or improve what they have?
  • Will you be able to write the post to be easily consumed and understood by them?
  • Are the resources needed to write the post feasible for you?
  • Will it be profitable for you to rank with this post?

The winning idea will be those for which you answer yes to the questions.

In case that you have identified a topic that has been already covered in the past with a blog post, but it complies with the rest of the previous criteria so is still attractive to pursue, then think about how you can create a unique selling proposition that differentiates yours from what came before. Two common options are:

  • Do a follow-up post, completing or expanding the initial information.
  • Reformat the post to build a tool, create a checklist, a guide, a list or compilation of resources, an infographic, a presentation or a video that makes it easier and more attractive to consume, and then write a post to announce it.

Some examples; rinse and repeat.

I contribute my writing to Moz, State of Digital, and at WooRank and it´s fundamental for me to have a process to follow to be able to come up each month with new blog posts ideas, so I’ve followed this process in the past to write these posts:

It has worked pretty well for me in the past and hopefully it does for you too!

Do you use a process to identify your blog posts ideas? I would love to hear about it.


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New Study Shows Original Content Reaches More People on Facebook

Posted by Chad_Wittman

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

Facebook continues to make significant changes in the news feed. This time Facebook has decreased the importance (technically the “weight”) of status updates. With these changes occurring so rapidly in the news feed, many brand managers want to know how to stay on top of it all.

We dug deep into the data to see what the latest change was and wanted to introduce a philosophy to stay ahead of the constant changes. We analyze and monitor this type of data for thousands of Facebook pages with a tool called EdgeRank Checker.

On Jan. 21, Facebook released a blog post explaining that status updates from pages are less engaging than status updates from friends. In other words, status updates were going to lose exposure in the news feed.

The change was implemented nearly immediately, as we saw organic reach begin to dip rapidly. In the graph below, you’ll see a ~40% decrease from the two weeks after Jan. 21, as compared to the two weeks before:

While frustrating for many brands, status updates aren’t displayed nearly as often as links and photos, as they typically don’t provide as much value to the business. Status updates are typically used for gathering general opinions or quick message updates, whereas links can drive actual traffic.

During this change, the other content types were not significantly impacted. Most experienced a very moderate decrease, which is most likely due to normal fluctuations. Interestingly, videos have now become the strongest performer in the news feed. Our sample size for posts with videos is less than optimal, but our historical data shows a similar pattern. For brands that have the capability to deliver engaging videos, it should be considered as an interesting content outlet in the future.

How does a brand stay ahead?

As we study each change in the news feed, a common theme begins to appear. Content that creates value tends to bubble to the top. Google has a similar approach with search results. We see Facebook slowly becoming similar to Google in that capacity. When we examine the brands that are less impacted by negative changes, they tend to have strong engagement—specifically shares. Why is this? We think we can explain this phenomenon with a concept called Content Originator.

Content Originator

Brands that actually create the content (thus, Content Originators) are the ones that experience the most value in the news feed. We’ve seen Google take a similar approach with examining inbound links. Content Originators actually have less to do with Facebook specifically, as compared to the maturation of any social network. Twitter most likely experiences similar results, which you can see as a Tweet propagates across the world—the Content Originator gets more exposure.

The reason that Content Originators are able to succeed with an onslaught of changes is that they are able to utilize natural distribution networks such as shares. While Facebook’s algorithms may not weigh their initial post as heavily as before, strong engagement and shares are strong signals to distribute the content further.

The news feed is filled with increasing competition that boasts larger and larger budgets to gain exposure within the feed. Being a Content Originator helps slice through the noise created by so many pages re-reporting news. The re-reporting of news is something that Facebook is attempting to decrease through these changes. It is also possible that brands will begin to gain additional exposure through the “Trending” section if they’re the Content Originator of a new and trending topic.

In an example below, you can see the local value that Facebook provides in the trending result. A story that was shared on Facebook 2,000+ times from CarolinaLive (not quite a Content Originator, but as close as you can get in a situation like this, as compared to a CNN-type news source) is given the extra exposure. The next object listed is from Fox Carolina News, again more of a Content Originator than the national brand of Fox News.

The example above is meant to illustrate how Facebook perceives Content Originators elsewhere in their platform. We use things like this as clues to better understand how the news feed works.

Conclusion

Facebook decreased organic reach of status updates by ~40% on Jan. 21. For most brands, this doesn’t have a large impact on their strategy, as they are mostly using links and photos to further increase their brand. Using a concept called Content Originator might help craft a content strategy that stays ahead of news feed changes. Facebook may be placing additional value on content originators in the news feed, and is surely valuing brands with strong engagement—especially ones with high share levels.

Methodology

We studied roughly 50,000 posts from 800 different pages for the two weeks before and after Jan. 21. For most metrics, we examined the median of each page’s average performance over the time period analyzed. Engagement is defined as likes + comments + shares for this study.


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6 Ways to Earn Higher Rankings Without Investing in Content Creation and Marketing – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

With all the buzz about content marketing and how wonderful a way it is to earn higher rankings, it’s easy to forget about all the other tools that good SEOs and marketers have at their disposal. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers six ways to improve your rankings without spending a dime on content creation and marketing.

6 Ways to Earn Higher Rankings Wihout Investing in Content Creation & Marketing – Whiteboard Friday_1

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I thought I’d address something that’s going on in the broader SEO and inbound marketing communities, which is this idea that the only thing that SEOs do anymore is create content and do content marketing. So we build some content and then we go market and we outreach and we try and get people to link to it.

That is truly minimizing the job requirements, which are vast, incredibly vast and much bigger than this idea. So I thought I’d take a little stab and drop a pebble in the ocean of things that SEOs are responsible for by tackling these six ways, six out of probably 600 ways that you can earn higher rankings without investing in content creation or content marketing.

So, first off, number one, you can make your snippets better and your pages serve that intent. Let me show you what I’m talking about.

So basically, in the search results page, this is a very small mockup of that, but I might do a search and I’ll see a bunch of titles and then the URL below it and the meta description below that. I might even see an author profile. I might see video snippets. If you’ve got some rich snippet mark-up, I’ll see those in here, and this leads off to your page. By improving both the snippet here, so that could mean adding rel=”author”,
that could mean adding a video, that could mean adding some rich mark-up, that could mean changing the title, tweaking the title to be a little bit more compelling to click on, changing the description, even actually, surprisingly, changing the URL. Some studies have show recently that URLs in fact do contribute to whether people choose to click on them.

Then it’s not just about making this compelling, but also making whatever is on that page, whatever is on that snippet match what’s on the page that users get to, because as we know, pogo sticking, people jumping off of this page hurts you in two big ways. One, it hurts you because the engines directly look at pogo sticking behavior and go, “Oh, people click on this and then they go back and they don’t like it. I’m out of here. I don’t want to rank this page.” Two, you don’t have an opportunity to convert those people into buyers or into potential sharers or linkers to your content.

All right, so number one, completely outside of content creation can seriously move your rankings up.

Number two, improving the crawl friendliness and the pages-of-value ratio on your website.

So I was talking to a very smart SEO over email the other day, and he said something that I loved. He said, “I have never seen and never worked with a large site where improving crawl bandwidth didn’t mean significant increases in organic search traffic.” I thought that was very wise and well said. That’s certainly been the case that I have seen as well, but I liked his phrasing of it in particular. So this idea that, well okay, I’ve got a good page here, a good page represented by smiley face dude, and smiley face dude is linking out to, well, three not so great pages, pages that Google doesn’t particularly want to index. They don’t provide a ton of value to them or their searchers or to users in general. It’s often the case that websites just have these.

Go and look at your website. I bet you’ll click around, and you’ll be like, “Man, why do we even have this page anymore? This doesn’t help anybody. It doesn’t help anybody.” Well, if you improve the ratio of those pages, get rid of or toss out or even just remake some of those pages, you can significantly improve your crawl bandwidth and the happiness that Google sees with your site. I’m not just talking about sort of penalties, like Panda, that might affect people who have very large quantities of low quality stuff.

But, in addition to this, in addition to the ratio, you can also look at your navigation. If you’ve got something like this, so this is a pretty clean navigation system. This one page is linking out to six or seven other pages. That’s fine. But what about when I get to this page and he’s linking to one other page, who links to one other page, who links to one other page, who links to one other page, who links to another page that’s actually a duplicate of that first page I was talking about? Improving this kind of stuff, making these models of navigation clean, making your site more indexable, making your navigation get you into deep pages in fewer clicks, and making all of the pages accessible rather than having to go down these wormholes can really improve your site’s traffic as well.

Number three, probably the simplest one on the list. You make your pages faster, the Internet will reward you. Some of this is direct. Some of this is Google essentially saying, “Yes, page speed is a very small portion of our ranking algorithm. We do take it into consideration.” But a lot of it is not Google directly. A lot of it is users being much happier and doing the same thing we talked about up here, which is reducing your bounce rate, reducing that pogo-sticking activity, and meaning that you have an opportunity to convert a lot more of those people into buyers, sharers, appreciators of your brand.

Number four, I actually really like this one. This is one of my favorite ways to do link building in general, link earning in general, and that is to leverage your network to help attract those links, shares, traffic, endorsements, etc. I’ve seen a couple people that I really admire in the field who’ve basically taken this tactic. They say, “Hey, whenever someone tells us we really love you, we think your service is amazing”, they say,
“Thank you so much. That means the world to us, and it would mean even more if you would tell someone about it,” your friends, your social network, point to us on your site somewhere.

We don’t care if it’s a followed link, a no followed link, we’re not asking for links. What we’re asking for is if you think you’ve got something great by working with us, by buying our product, by using our service, by interacting with us, we helped you in some way, please share it. That’s all I’m asking. I saw it in one woman’s email signature. She just said, “If I have ever been helpful to you, it would be awesome if you could share our website.”

I don’t know what the conversion rate is like for her, but it doesn’t even matter if it’s 0.001%. That is a bunch more links and shares and help. What a wonderful way to earn the kinds of signals that will help you rank better.

By the way, for a little bit more on this topic and a specific tactic here, check out a blog post I wrote a little while ago called “The Help Me Help You Dinner.” It’s a little Jerry McGuire I know, but sorry.

Number five, go try this process for me. Identify the pages on your site that make people happy but that aren’t earning organic search traffic. Here’s what I mean. They’ve got high engagement, a low bounce rate, a good number of visits, a high browse rate, meaning people are clicking and visiting other pages after them, but they don’t get organic search traffic.

This actually happens quite a bit, that you see pages like this. Oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes the culprit here is that the keyword targeting and the keyword optimization just isn’t there. Essentially, these are pages that are created not by SEO folks or by SEOs who just kind of forgot or were targeting keywords that have long since stopped being searched for. Go improve those. Go find the keywords that those pages should be ranking for and then update the page, the titles, the content a little bit. You usually shouldn’t have to tweak much of the content at all on the page in order to get the targeting right and dialed in just a little bit. Sometimes you might even change the URL, and then you can do a URL rewrite or a 301. That’s fine too.

If you’re doing a more significant update process, go ahead and relaunch and reshare it as well, especially if a lot of people have forgotten about it or search engines have forgotten about it. Just that update, just that freshness signal can help you get a little bit more in your rankings.

Last thing I’ll mention. I don’t know where the ideas come from that classic link building is entirely dead. It’s not, and one of the things that is truly still alive and still very powerful is what I call classic competitive style link building. I recognize that kind of low-quality guest posting and directory link building and a lot of these other more manual, scalable features have really gone away, but classic competitive link building is still just as valuable as it ever has been and not just for SEO, but for the traffic you can earn from those places too.

So go and use your favorite link building tool. We like Open Site Explorer or Fresh Web Explorer if you’re looking at sort of things that have been just recently published. We do have a tool as well called Link Intersect that helps you find pages that two or more of your competitors are linked to by but you have not been, those kinds of things. I think Majestic SEO also has a feature like that, so you can check them out.

Then you create this sort of prioritized list for outreach and starting to try to contact some of these people. What I recommend, because a lot of people get disheartened if they go to the first guy and there’s just a bunch of hoops that they have to jump through and it’s very hard to find any contact information and then it’s very hard to get a response and when you do get a response, it’s negative, and you can just get beaten down.

What I like to do, therefore, especially because getting links from a diverse group of places is often more valuable than just getting one or two here or there, is to go ahead and prioritize the list by how easy you think it will be. If there’s a journalist who’s already following you on Twitter and they’ve written about some of your competitors and you figure they’re going to keep writing about this topic, why wouldn’t they write about you?
Great! Do a little bit of outreach. Ask them what you can do to be a feature in the next story. It’s probably a relatively simple one. If there’s a page that’s listing resources of the kind that you already have, great, go reach out to them. That’s probably a very simple one.

This sort of stuff and hundreds more like it are all in the realm of what modern SEOs still have to be doing in addition to the newer obligations that we have around content creation and content marketing, all of this social media work and those kinds of things. So I try not to forget any of this, but I know that we have a lot of other obligations as well.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We’ll see you again next time. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


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