If you subscribe to our blog or follow our company, which by the way 99.9% of people agree is AWESOME, then you know we believe content creation should be the cornerstone of any healthy online or inbound marketing plan. Many of you reading this blog will agree with this philosophy, but you also understand that a good content strategy comes with its own set of obstacles that need to be overcome in order to create an effective campaign. One such obstacle is generating new content ideas on a consistent basis.
If you have any inbound marketing experience you understand that the first step in creating a successful content strategy is keyword research. In this blog I want to show you how we use a keyword research tool called Spyfu to first help us find the right keywords to target for client content, and then how we use it to help us generate content ideas for our client’s blog posts. Are you ready?
Now that I’ve got your attention, let’s start with the first step, finding competitors that are spending money on adwords. For this example let’s talk about the health and wellness niche and do a google search for the keyword “Exercise equipment.”
Now we want to choose one of the businesses that are bidding on this keyword in the sponsored ads section of this page. Next we’re going to copy the url of the business we’ve chosen, Fitness Blowout, and paste it into Spyfu to get a list of their most profitable keywords.
Let’s pretend we want to increase sales of our elliptical machines. Looking at this list, let’s choose a keyword that fits this goal. Let’s perform a Spyfu SmartSearch for the keyword “elliptical machine” in order to find keywords to target and create content around. When looking for target keywords, we want to find longtail keyword phrases with a combination of decent search volume and low SEO difficulty (less than 200). These keywords also need to help you reach your goal of selling more elliptical machines, so keep the context of the keyword in mind.
Here I’ve highlighted a few keywords that meet the above criteria. A few things stand out here that are worth noting.
Several of the keywords that would be good targets are centered around reviews, so one thing I would do as a marketer for this company is create an “elliptical reviews” section on my blog and consistently post hi quality reviews of different elliptical machines.
For instance, take a look at our list of potential keywords. You’ll see two specific product keywords “spacesaver elliptical” and “sole elliptical e35”. Booyah!!! You’ve got your next two blog articles. “Sole Elliptical e35 Review: Worth the Price?”, or “Spacesaver Elliptical Review: Does it Deliver?”
To jazz up your reviews create video, have them transcribed for the blog for SEO purposes, and post them to Youtube to drive even more traffic. Ask for reader input, giving you even more great content which the search engines will LOVE.
Simply going through this process and using a little brain power, will help you come up with new content ideas naturally, but I’m not done, there’s more. Let’s see if we can find any other content ideas for these other potential keywords. Let’s do a google search for “spacesaver elliptical” and see what comes up.
Most of the results on this page are websites selling “spacesaver ellipticals”, but about halfway down the page we see an article by Livestrong.com called “The Best Space-saving Elliptical Trainers”. I would then click on the link and take a look at the article. This looks like a pretty solid article, so my next step would be to come up with a similar title “2013 Top Five SpaceSaver Elliptical Machines”, hand this article to my writer as a resource, and tell the writer I want something similar but better. If you have solid writers like we do, this is enough to get a great article written.
Let’s use another keyword and go through the process one more time, so you get it. Let’s do a search for “best home elliptical”.
Again, looking at this page, you’ll see most of the results have to do with ratings or reviews of the best home elliptical, so I would come up with a similar title “2013’s Ten Best Home Elliptical Machines For the Money”, refer to this page as my writer’s resource, and have them create a great piece of content. It’s that easy. Remember also, when coming up with titles think of your buyer personas. In the example above, my guess is that there are several determining factors people look at when buying an elliptical machine, and price is most likely one of those. I wanted to use “for the money” in the title to capture that audience’s attention
So there you have it. Spyfu is one of the many tools we use to help us generate content ideas for our clients. If you’d like to check out Spyfu for yourself, and see how you like it, here’s the link.
We find that coming up with great content ideas has always been a struggle for our clients. If you’re having the same issue, I hope this post helps you come up with some great ideas for your own business. The next step is finding great writers. Here at 98togo.com we go through a writer match process for each of our clients to help them find the perfect fit for their content creation. If you need some help, let us know. We’d love to learn more about your business and goals.
Do you have any tools or processes to help you generate new content topics? Share them with our readers, drop us a comment below.
