The concept of a blog is a relatively new phenomenon. Teenagers first kicked the trend off in the early 2000s, posting their feelings on an online platform for their friends to comment on and relate to. In essence, it was an online journal where you could either choose to be anonymous or not.
Wind the clock forward a few years, however, and you’ll find that blogging is a crucial component of getting your website, and therefore your business, ranking well on search engines. By using strategically placed keywords and hyperlinks, you are more likely to reach page one of the search results than if you didn’t have a blog. Getting to that first page is what every business should aim for because 92 percent of people using a search engine don’t go past page one.
We now know why blogs are relevant, but there’s another reason: freshness. If your content is outdated and hasn’t been updated for some time, Google is less likely to bring your webpage into the spotlight. It wants to offer searchers the latest and greatest, and if your website hasn’t been updated in a year, yours won’t be the site potential customers see.
However, that can be a hard concept for businesses to get their head around. What more can they add? What if their products, services, and staff haven’t changed? How do you keep it updated? That’s where blogs come in. By including relevant content based on what people are looking for, you’re keeping your webpage fresh and inviting for potential customers. The hardest part, however, is finding out what to post.
Aside from hiring an SEO expert to take care of the entire process – which would save you so much time and money – you can also easily find blog posts yourself if you know where to look. Here are five ways to find topics for your blog below.
Listen to your customers
In any line of business, you’re sure to find that your customers and potential customers are getting in touch to ask questions before they decide to buy your products or services. Take note of those questions. Are they frequently asked? Why do you think they are asking them? Would it save both you and those customers time to include content covering those frequently asked questions?
If you include blog posts that are relevant to your line of work and can help your customers, all the better. You can then optimize this content with the help of SEO experts to include hyperlinks and commonly searched keywords.
Take note of what your competition is doing
It never hurts to keep a watchful eye on your direct competition – someone who is selling the same products as you or is providing the same services. What does their website look like? Does it have a blog? What are they putting on it? Don’t copy what they are doing, but use their techniques as inspiration for your own blog posts. If it looks like it’s working for them, then use that same concept to create unique blog topics that can work for you as well.
Join a social media group
There are over 150 million blogs in existence, which goes to show that there must be something worth writing about. If you’re struggling for ideas, join a blogger group on Facebook or another social media platform. Many people love to share their thoughts, and you may find you have a long list of potential ideas just from taking notice of what people are saying.
Read current news
Whether you still get the newspaper, or you prefer to read news online, pay more attention to what is being said than you currently do. Current news can more than be helpful for coming up with blog topic ideas. For example, if you run a motorcycle sales website – selling ATVs and road bikes – and there is a story about an ATV accident in your local paper, pay attention. Your next blog post could be “Here’s how you can stay safe on your ATV.” Every national news headline can be a potential lead for your next post.
Subscribe to other blogs
Coming up with blog topics on your own can be tough, so why not subscribe to other blogs for inspiration? They don’t even have to be in your own industry or line of work, but what they write may just resonate with you, enabling you to turn that topic idea around into something that’s relevant to you and your business.
Blogging used to be an outlet for teenagers to vent, but in the last few years, it has become a vital part of search engine optimization. If you’re ready to see your business rank higher than ever before, consult an SEO expert. They will walk you through the entire process.
