Are you responsible for the Content Marketing strategy of your company or a client? Do you doubt the ROI of the articles you want to write? Or more simply, you start from a blank page for the creation of your blog, and you don’t know where to start?
Facebook groups, related Google searches, People Also Asked… There are many ways to find article topics for your blog.
Here, let’s dwell on 2 techniques that use data analysis to generate tons of blog post ideas with maximum SEO potential. All without too much effort!
The Content Gap: finding article ideas based on competitor data
For this 1st process, you will need to use an SEO analysis tool, such as Ahrefs or SEMRush.
Through the Content Gap feature (also called Keyword Gap), it is possible to discover the articles that work for your competitors, and the keywords that you must “attack” in priority to create attractive content!
In this article, we will be using SEMRush. Since it is a paid tool, you can simply subscribe to the 7-day free trial version. This period will be more than enough to allow you to release enormously blog post ideas.
Once this is done, go to the tab “Keyword Opportunities”.
You arrive on a page where you must enter the URL of your website and those of your competitors (the tool allows you to perform an analysis of 5 domains simultaneously).
In the first field, enter the address of your site, then that of your competitors in the following fields. Then, be sure to select France as the geographical area, then launch the search.
To illustrate this process, I took the example of e-commerce sites for musical instruments 🎸
NB: If you have any doubts about the identity of your competitors, SEMrush will automatically suggest some to you when you enter your site’s URL in the 1st field.
The “missing” keywords: your priority list
On the page that is displayed next, 3 blocks stand out. The 1st block, called “Best Possibilities for You”, contains the information that interests us. It allows you to visualize the keywords:
- Missing: keywords on which your competitors are positioned in Google search results, and your site is not. Valuable information for the creation of new content.
- Weak: keywords on which your website is positioned, but ranks lower than your competitors. Valuable information for optimizing existing content.
Of course, the more important the sites analyzed, the longer the list of keywords will be. In the example, I have a potential of over 5000 missing keywords, and 3000 weak keywords.
To get a priority list of those to work on, you will have to sort it out.
Informational intent: the filter for editorial content
Click on the “Missing” tab in the bottom table and apply the filter ” Intent: informational ». You will thus keep only the keywords behind which a search for information is hidden, therefore oriented for writing an article.
You can also play with the “Position” and “Keyword Difficulty (KD)” filters to display more or fewer keywords. For the example, I applied the filter:
- Position: Competitors in the Top 20. This displays the MCs for which all my competitors rank in the top 20 results of the SERP, while my site is not positioned at all. In some cases, you will have to expand to “Top 50”, or even not apply this filter to obtain a sufficiently large list.
- KD (Keyword Difficulty): from 0 to 30. This displays MCs that SEMrush finds to be fairly easy to rank for on the first page of Google. The higher the “KD”, the more intense your SEO efforts will have to be, especially in terms of acquiring backlinks. Again, you can expand a little more if necessary.
In this way, I was able to reduce my number of “Missing” keywords by 5000 to 800. All you have to do is export the list in the form of a spreadsheet using the button located to the right of the table.
Here you are now with a nice selection of priority keywordscontaining indications of their search volume and the details of the positions of your competitors.
You can still clean up your spreadsheet in :
- Removing columns related to Google ad info: CPC and Competition;
- Filtering MCs for which the query is informational uniquely ;
- Integrating filters related to your expertise, your offer, your objectives…
Finally, you can easily draw inspiration from your competitors’ content because SEMrush provides you with the URL of the page that “ranks” on Google for each of the keywords in the table. 🙂
Other ways to find even more relevant ideas with the Content Gap
Informational intent as identified by SEMrush is not always perfect.
Which means these are not necessarily blog posts that stand out on the SERP for these types of queries, especially when you analyze e-commerce sites.
To get a complete and usable list for your writing projects, I recommend repeating this process:
- With other competitors;
- With blogs only, to identify the most promising article topics in your market
- By analyzing sub-domains or sub-folders dedicated to the editorial (eg: blog.domainname.com or domainname.com/blog);
- By focusing on the “unique” keywords of just one of your competitors. You may find nuggets on which neither you nor the rest of your competitors are positioned;
- Using “weak” keywords to identify pages on your site that need to be optimized.
It takes a bit more effort, but if you do it once and for all, you’ll clear enough quality ideas to feed your blog for many months!
A technique in the Search Console to exploit your existing content
Here is a simple and ingenious technique to find blog post ideas from keywords typed by Internet users who found your site. This technique is also a good way to broaden the scope of your semantic cocoons.
To do this, go to another essential SEO tool for optimizing your website: the Google Search Console.
Click on the “Performance” tab.
Filter the data for the last 6 months, then click on the “Pages” tab in the report.
Then, click on one of your top performing articles.
At the top of the report on this page, click on the “Export” button, in order to be able to manipulate the data in a spreadsheet.
In the Google Sheet that appears, create a filter above the “Position” column, and filter by “Condition > Greater than”, with a number greater than 30 or more.
This will show terms where your page ranks above #30 on Google.
As you will have understood, the idea here is to display the keywords for which your page is not ranking very well.
This means that these terms belong to the semantic field of your page, but that they are not 100% relevant.
NB: the impressions for each keyword that will appear in the resulting list will in fact be quite low. But not indicative of a low overall search volume for the keyword so far.
By applying this filter, you get a list of sub-topics related to the theme of your article, which you can deepen in dedicated articles.
And in these new articles that you will create, you will be able to integrate an internal link at the top of your contentto the initial page, to create beautiful semantic cocoons 🙂
So much for these two techniques that allow you to find article topics based on an analysis of either internal or competitive data. You can them replicate ad infinitum and so never run out of ideas again! And you, do you have techniques to feed your blog with content that serves your SEO? Share them in comments!