Are you writing a business blog and struggling for blog topic ideas?
Looking at your blog and seeing the last article published five months ago?
We all know blogging is great for SEO and to show your expertise with your customers. Google loves blogs. Customers love blogs.
But what to blog ABOUT?
It’s not easy to figure out when you are busy running a small business.
My number one piece of advice? Hire a copywriter like me to write your blogs for you. Let them figure out what to write about.
But, that may not be affordable for you. COVID-19 has hit us all in the guts. So, your marketing budget may not extend to outsourcing your blogging.
That means you can either leave it alone – and watch your competitors gain SEO rankings ahead of you and your website fails to keep customers lingering on your site for as long as possible (because there’s not much to read).
Or, you can do it yourself.
Which brings me to today’s subject: blog topic ideas.
Of course, you can just pick a subject based on:
- questions your customers ask about…[your product here]
- mistakes people make when trying to …. {your expertise here}
- thirteen ways to… (your service here)
These are all tried and tested blog topic ideas. Go for it! (Ahem. This blog you are reading now is a variation of the third bullet.)
But when you’ve exhausted all those options you need something more. Plus, you want topic ideas that will help your SEO. So you need to know the right keywords to target.
Hello Google.
Google is generous to us blog content writers. It gives us free tools. It tells us what people are searching. You can pay for expensive keyword research tools like SEMRush and AHrefs. But why not get the data free from Google instead?
Blog topic idea #1: use Google autocomplete
Google is known for finishing your search based on the data from gazillions of previous search terms.
Fun fact: if you type in ‘Why am I…” into Google. It will finish your search with “…so tired?”
I used this recently for a client ADHD coach, Jodi Green. Google does the work for me and tells me the common issues that people search when asking questions about ADHD. There’s a good handful of blog article ideas—and clearly many concerns coming from parents of children with ADHD.
Give it a try yourself. Type a possible search related to your products or services. A good start is framing it as a question. Such as
- How to get started with…
- What are the benefits of…
- Why should I…
You might need to have a play around till you find the right answers. The joy of this tool is you can feel confident that you are writing a blog about a commonly searched term. This article may not rank in first place for the search phrase but as you continue blogging about your area of expertise it all adds to the SEO magic.
Blog topic ideas tool #2: people also ask
When you type (or speak) a query into Google, it wants to be helpful and make sure you find the right answer. So it has a feature called people also ask.
Again, it is telling you the popular searches around your product.
This function doesn’t appear with every search. It’s based on questions. Questions are good subjects for blog posts. So, it works a treat.
I recently wrote a blog for an interior decorator about bedroom decor for winter.
Using the people also ask function I can see potential blog subjects for future articles. Clearly, the area of colours for winter is a popular subject.
Crikey. It is almost too easy isn’t it?
Blog topic ideas tool #3: related searches
This feature appears on every search. Which makes it super helpful.
Scroll all the way down to the bottom of your Google search results page and you’ll get the related searches function.
Google knows that if you’ve made it to the bottom of the search results page that you may not have entered in your ideal search phrase. So, it suggests alternatives that may be all accurate. It’s all based on data of previous searches. And that’s the gold you want for blog topic ideas.
I have a new client (whoo!) who manufactures shampoo for kids. By typing ‘shampoo for kids’ into Google, and scrolling to the end of the search results page we get the related search data.
This data tells us that people are searching for products for girls of particular ages, curly hair and advice on when to stop using baby shampoo.
Three great blog articles identified right there.
You probably haven’t seen this feature in a while. Because let’s face it – who makes it to the end of a Google search page these days?
Give it a try
Play around with these three features. See what blog post ideas come up. Let me know if you have any success!
Happy blogging
Kate
