What Should I Blog About?

Blogging may sound like a massive, complicated, and frustrating process. On the other hand, maybe you LOVE blogging and can't stop writing. Blogging is an important marketing activity and it's worth paying attention to what you write. Yes, it should be about your topic but some key terms and phrases should be included, and researching those will significantly increase the value of your efforts.

Know Your Audience

You have a list of top customers and an idea of your ideal customers, right? If you've taken the Level 1 course here, you know all about how to define these personas. You probably also have a list of who ISN'T a good client. Similar to dating, you've got a green-flag and a red-flag list. Take some time to distill what your ideal customers may want to know about. You can learn this from any questions you get. Keep track of the common questions you get about your work, your successes, how you work, what certain terms mean, and especially any questions from people who turn into paying customers. These are all great topics to blog about.

One of your other customers, your top and most important customer online is always Google (this is also covered in the Level 1 course). You want Google to know you exist and what you have to offer so they can recommend you to others who are looking for your magic. Blogging is a key step in training Google. Keep Google top of mind when deciding on what you share so they can tell others about you. They can be your best sales rep!

How Do I Know What Google Wants?

Google wants to know everything and we're excited to train them in what we have to offer right? The issue is that there may be other people offering the same things. So many people are trying to train Google and they may have started much earlier than you. They have such a head-start so what's left to grab? This is where keyword research comes in.
Anything you search for in Google is a keyword. "Vegan restaurants near me" is a keyword (even though it's multiple words). "Tantra massage" is a keyword. "How do I learn tarot cards" is a keyword.

Valuable Keywords

Keyword research is a process of finding which keywords fit two key criteria: Many people are searching for it, and few people are competing for it. Let's look at "yoga" as a keyword:

This comes from a paid tool we use called Ahrefs. There are many free ones out there which I will highlight later. Notice that under keyword difficulty, this scores a 93 out of 100. It is a very difficult keyword to rank for. That is, it's hard to get your site on the front page of the Google search results, and really, when was the last time you went to page 2 of the results? In the second column, we see the volume. This says that there are 183,000 searches a month for this at least. On the right, we see that there are over 1.4 million searches for "yoga" each month around the world. So many people are searching for it but it's super difficult to rank for. Let's try another keyword, "Yoga with cats"

This is way easier and there is still an average of 100 people searching for it each month! Hooray! Below the score of 5, it says they estimate you'll need links from about 6 other websites to help you rank on the first page of the Google results. Getting people to link to you is another important part of the process but that's a separate conversation. You could write some posts that specifically include the phrase, "yoga with cats" and have a much better chance at getting found online.

Keyword Research Tools

How do we find these keywords without paying for an extra tool like Ahrefs? Luckily, there are a bunch out there that all work well.

1. Wordstream- Super easy and fast. This one will also give you suggestions for related terms and tell you how easy it is to rank on Bing as well as Google.
2. Keyword.io- This gives you a few results for free but they want your money.
3. Answer The Public- This wins for the most beautiful. You can search a few times each day for free and it gives you a wheel of similar questions people search for. It won't tell you the volume or difficulty but will give you some ideas.
4. Google Trends- Google has a tool that lets you see how frequently a search comes up. Like Answer The Public it's more visual but it also doesn't show details of difficulty. It does however show you where in the world people search for your term and offers some related keywords.
5. Google Autocomplete- This is the easiest but offers the least data. When you start a new search in Google it offers suggestions for what you may want to search for. These suggestions come from popular searches others have made. You can use this in two ways. You can keep adjusting your input till you get no suggestions or, you can find new topics you hadn't thought of to write about.

Summary

Keyword research is just part of what's called SEO. That's the process of getting your site and content to show up on the first page of the Google results. SEO can be a full-time job and you're already doing it. We can all be doing it better and keyword research is one of the first steps in that process. Look into what's already out there and what's missing then you'll have a better sense of what to write about on your blog and your site.

Photo credit: Looking Glass Photo