Last week we looked at strategies for identifying the best keywords; assuming that we now have a good list of them, the next step is to build these keywords into the foundations of our website.
Site content is not just about product descriptions and short company profiles. There are many opportunities beyond this for interesting subpages and blog articles. Quality content boosts SEO rankings by increasing the likelihood that users will actually read it and in the process stay a little bit longer on your website, this is also great for conversion rates.
SMEs may find the process of creating original content daunting. The question is always where to start? Fortunately, the answer is already right in front of you. Take your keyword research and combine it with a bit of time looking into trends and you have everything you need to start writing great content.
The first part of turning keywords into interesting content is understanding the intentions and backgrounds of your potential customers. The aim is to create content that search engines will see as answering users' questions most effectively.
Content that manages to do this will achieve better rankings. This doesn't mean that content should always be narrow and repetitive, but the connections between terms shouldn't be too vague or abstract
For example, Sylvester Stallone and the World Cup were high ranking search terms in 2018, but a car insurance company talking about the potential insurance issues raised in Stallone's 1981, soccer movie, escape to victory probably wouldn't have gotten many clicks, even at the height of World Cup mania. For those of you who haven't heard of this film, there is a good reason for this.
It's always better to see this kind of thing in action, so let's imagine you are the owner of an umbrella shop in London. You've done the keyword research, using rankingCoach, and decided to optimize the site for the term 'London Umbrella', now we want to create interesting content around this term. Let's head to Google Trends with our term 'London Umbrella' and see if we can find some useful information for creating engaging content.
The global search data for our term 'London umbrella' gives some interesting clues on the types of customers that may be looking for our business.
The United Kingdom - 100
Canada - 26
Australia - 11
The United States - 9
India - 3
Global worldwide search results for the term 'London umbrella' taken from Google Trends 15.08.19
An important thing to understand with these results is that percentage search volume is linked to the population; search volume in the UK may appear to be over 10 times higher than in the United States, but the population in the US is roughly five times the size of the United Kingdom.
This means that the number of searches coming from the United States is around 40% of the size of searches coming from the UK. This is confirmed when we look at the average search number in the rankingCoach application, where we find an average monthly search volume for 'London umbrella' in the UK of 720 and 320 for the US.
India has an even larger population so their percentage of three also represents a much higher number ( population 1,339 billion). However, for a retail shop in London the United States data is more important because the US sends by far the largest number of tourists to the UK. On the other hand, for e-commerce, the Indian results could be very useful.
There is another important question to ask: are all the searches from the United Kingdom from people who live there?
If we look at searches within The United Kingdom for the term 'umbrella shop' and 'umbrella store' we find some interesting clues relating to the backgrounds of the people making these searches.
In the United Kingdom, the vast majority of people use the word shop and not store. An extreme example: In Scotland, the term 'bra store' has zero percent search volume in comparison with the term 'bra shop'. This means that for all intents and purposes, no one in Scotland is looking for a 'bra store'.
Another sign of local residents using 'shop' rather than the more North American 'store' can be seen in the UK search results for 'umbrella shop near me' and 'umbrella store near me.
The latter has no search volume at all in the UK. This is largely down to the fact that this term is mainly used on mobile devices and many tourists from North America will find data connections too expensive. Tourists also tend to plan their days more, so are less likely to use phrases like this which are for spare of the moment decisions.
On the other hand with the term 'Umbrella Shop' and 'Umbrella Store we find that at times the two terms have close to the same volume.
We can assume that many of these searches are from tourists, who are perfect customers for our London umbrellas. So now we have an important audience to aim our content at and perhaps a new keyword (store) to try that we may have otherwise undervalued.
We can use trends like this to uncover important information for our business, wherever it is in the world.
Geographic search volumes have given us a good idea of our audience.
Now to create some engaging topics. We can do this by taking a look at the top related topics. The number one related topic and query for 'umbrella London' for worldwide searches are 'the Umbrella Academy'.
Those of us with Netflix will be aware that 'the Umbrella Academy' is a popular show. Realizing this, some people might avoid making this theme part of their content strategy, but dig a little deeper and we find an interesting chance for content.
By taking a little time to understand the show Umbrella Academy, we see that it is about young superheroes who carry old-fashioned umbrellas, apologies to any fans for this gross oversimplification. Clearly, people are interested in buying this type of umbrella as the term 'umbrella academy umbrella' had over a hundred times the global and UK search volume of 'umbrella London' in April this year.
To decide if your new ideas, connections, and subjects are right for content, you should ask yourself these four questions.
1 Will this create original and interesting content?
2 Can it be linked to the services and products I am offering?
3 Does it create plenty of chances to weave in the required keywords?
4 Does it have a reasonable search volume?
To even consider writing content, you should at least have two yeses.
With our example, we have all four: An article connected to the show will make interesting content; the umbrellas from the show are just the types of classic umbrella that an umbrella shop in London sells, there are plenty of chances for using the relevant keywords and there is a high search volume. Now we are ready to start using this interesting ingredient for creating engaging content.
The golden number for SEO content is around 1000 words; we need to find a way to write content that can maintain user interest for at least this long, Often we can get a good idea of how our ideas will map out by summing them up in the title. For our Umbrella academy London Umbrella ideas, here are five ideas off the top of my head.
1 Finding your umbrella academy umbrella in London:
2 Are umbrella academy umbrellas inspired by the London Umbrella?
3 How to get an umbrella academy umbrella from a London Umbrella shop?
4 Did the umbrella academy umbrellas take its inspiration from the classic London umbrella?
5 The London Umbrella academy: your guide to the best umbrella shops in London
Just by looking at these potential titles, we start to see how a dry fifty-word piece on a type of umbrellas can become an interesting thousand-word piece on travel and classic London umbrellas. If only every product was linked to a hit show! Plan your paragraph headers and get writing!
Now we see how trends can help us to understand our customers better and to create interesting and engaging ideas for content. If you need help finding those keywords, rankingCoach will help you find the best keywords and optimize your website for SEO, Local SEO, and SEM.