How to adapt keyword research to identify topics for your blog

I am beginning to understand my frustration when I read blog posts about keyword research. Frankly, most of the time they don’t apply to me. Good tactics for keyword research completely depends on what you are doing the keyword research for.

For example, if I have an eCommerce site and I sell leather belts, that is a different setting than a website designer trying to find clients for my business. What if I am the local accountant in my city? That is a different context as well.

Most of the keyword research articles I see seem to be geared towards the eCommerce site or, possibly, a local service based company.

What about you? What about those of you who run a WordPress business? How does all of the advice on the web relate?

Most WordPress businesses will have a blog. This is where I want to focus our time, though there is a need to map out the content for your blog and utilize appropriate keywords for more static pages. What we are attempting to do here is attract people who need your WordPress services.

Five things to be aware of when planning keyword research for your WordPress business blog.

Start with your audience

The first place to begin your keyword research is to know your audience. This can be a little tricky if you do not know who your audience is going to be. You may have an existing customer base or you may be brand new in business. If you have an existing customer base and you are happy with your customers, you have an idea of who your audience is for your blog. If you are brand new, it can be more of a challenge as you are identifying who you hope is your target audience.

Once you have identified your target audience, there are a few questions you need to ask. Ask three “what are” questions.

1. What are their pressing needs?

This question is key to gathering topic ideas. One of the first things to do is to identify the top 10-25 frequently asked questions you receive from clients. This will lay a foundation for building out your blog content and ask questions your current clients, as well as potential clients, have regarding your services.

Another thing is to identify the pain points they have. You can do this from conversations and surveys with your current clients. You may have already solved some problems for your clients. These are key topics that you need to record.

2. What are they interested in?

Your audience has various interests. What kind of hobbies do they have outside their business? Is there a common thread running through your client base? What about your target audience? Maybe they are all technophiles or love movies. Maybe your target audience loves the outdoors or comic cons.

3. What are closely related topics?

You may write about topics that are closely related to your services or products. WP Engine does a good job of writing about related topics. WP Engine, of course, is a WordPress managed hosting solution. They understand who their customers are and seek to write blog posts for that crowd.

I like the idea of helping your audience and target audience solve some problems that may not be exactly related to your product

Check Google Trends activity for specific keyword or topic

Have you written down some ideas yet? Good. You probably have a nice list of topic ideas just from the questions above.

Another idea to find topics in a related field, or even in your own industry, is to look at the Google Trends activity. It is also a good way to test if an idea has merit. For example, if people have stopped talking about the topic, you might put it aside, but if a topic is getting more searches, then you may be on to something.

Explore your analytics

The good thing about analytics such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console is that they can give you a wealth of information about the audience you already have coming to your blog. Google Analytics can give you some terrific demographics data which you can dig in to find interests for your audience. Google Analytics can also help you know what content on your website is the most visited and Google Search Console can help you identify terms that were used to find your website.

You can capitalize on this information to help build out blog post topics.

Thinking about LSI

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) has changed everything in the world of Google.  Google has evolved to the point that it can tell what the subject of a page is about by paying attention to all the words used for the subject. Think synonyms. Search Engine Journal explains,

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a mathematical method used to determine the relationship between terms and concepts in content. The contents of a webpage are crawled by a search engine and the most common words and phrases are collated and identified as the keywords for the page.

This has evolved and one of the things it has helped is the methods of searching by users, often called user intent. Users regularly search using questions. According to Search Engine Land (partner of Search Engine Journal), user intent changes how we approach keyword research,

The user intent of a keyword is the goal of the user typing the search query, and it typically falls into three categories: Do something, Know something, or Go somewhere. In fact, there’s often more than one intent per query.

Users search by a query these days and this is the backdrop for both our content as well as our keyword research.

Build core seed keywords

To decide your blog topics, choose a core of seed keywords. From here, you are going to narrow down your topic. Now, your keyword may not be really a single word, but more likely, a short phrase such as “website design” or “small business SEO.” From there, you are going to narrow your topic. In doing so, you will find both your topic ideas and your keywords (at this point they will be long-tail keywords).

You will have a niche based on your target audience, and, with your seed keywords, you will begin to build your hierarchy.

One thing I think you can do to find topics is to think narratively. For example, what is the process of small business SEO? Can you build an outline from that?

An interesting trick is to find your seed keyword in Wikipedia and study the article table of contents. It will give you some ideas.

This is a screenshot from “website design.” You can see the various topics and information. What is everything you would have to say about “website design?” Additionally, think of the process from your target audience’s viewpoint.

A small business is going to want to know some basic things like “hiring website designer,” “how much does website design cost,” and other similar questions.

Think cornerstone

To build a structure from which your blog can stand, think of using cornerstone content or pillar content.

Cornerstone content is a piece of content that makes up the cornerstone of your blog’s foundation. Think of how a building has a cornerstone. In fact, one thing you can do is take your seed keywords and right a foundation building piece of content. Brian Clark from Copyblogger says,

A cornerstone is something that is basic, essential, indispensable, and the chief foundation upon which something is constructed or developed. It’s what people need to know to make use of your website and do business with you.

There is more than one way to create cornerstone content. I outline multiple ways to use cornerstone content in this post at marketing blog Kikolani.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that Search Engine Optimization for content has completely changed. Keyword research is still important, but the entire dynamics have changed with the introduction of LSI and the need to match user intent. Rarely do users search with a single keyword, it is, as noted, usually a query.

As WordPress professionals, we have to help our customers match these searches on their website, or, for our own website.