What To Blog About: What To Write About in a Blog To Actually Drive Traffic

There’s no doubt that consistent content is going to help. It’s going to help with establishing yourself as an authority in your industry. It’s going to help make you become a better writer (or outsourcer, manager, etc.). In this post, we’re going to outline a process that helps those wondering what to write about in a blog and make sure it’s also going to help drive relevant traffic to your website and improve your overall visibility.

Whether you’re writing (or shooting) one piece of content a week or one piece of content a quarter, the video and ideas in this post will help you get the most out of your content marketing efforts.

Before we dive deeper into how to come up with specific topics with keywords, let’s have a refresher on how to set up a content marketing strategy.

Outline content in groups or themes

This is always the first thing I recommend to folks setting up a content marketing strategy, calendar, etc. Even if you don’t know the specifics on the detailed idea you’re going to write about at least outline some general themes of your business or industry that you could talk about.

For us at SEO Brothers, this might look like:

• Helping partners sell SEO
• Technical SEO
• Link Building Strategies
• Local SEO
• etc.

Each one of these themes could potentially have dozens of actual posts that dive deeper into sub-areas of these themes. Once you start thinking in themes it’s easier to come up with ideas based on your experience in the industry, conversations with past and current clients, common questions you have to answer, etc.

Let’s pretend for the sake of this post that we are working with a home renovation and construction company. Let’s generate some themes we can talk about:

• Windows
• Painting
• Garages
• Bathrooms
• Kitchens
• Water Softeners

Here are a few. These may align with the actual services we do, or they could be themes that help our customers that support the services we offer.

Someone who is in this industry likely has a wealth of information on most if not all of the above themes. The subject knowledge isn’t the issue, nor is it likely writing or shooting good quality content.

The issue is making sure the content you produce is going to have the best shot at being found and read, listened to, or watched.

So where do we go from here?

Find What Others Are Writing About on Their Blog Within These Themes

Now that we have a general idea of what we want to write about and even if we don’t have a formal strategy yet, we can start to identify some of the big content marketers in this industry. Every industry has some. Whether they are businesses killing it with their content or they are affiliate marketers trying to capture how-to content in a market. You’ll be able to find them fairly quickly by doing some quick google searching.

Start with questions. Google questions about each of these themes.

What size window should I choose?
How to finish a garage?
What type of paint to use for a bedroom?
Can I paint my house in the winter?
What do I do if my tub is leaking?
What’s the best flooring for a new kitchen.

These are just off the top of my head. Use your head for your questions.

If you want to get fancy. You can break out a spreadsheet at this point.

I know. So fancy.

So now I’m going to do some extremely sophisticated research. I’ll even record it because I think that’s how mind-blowing it might be.

Okay. We have our list. Now we are going to do some research with one of my favourite SEO tools, ahrefs.com.

This step is actually fairly important. We’re going to try to find sites that produce a lot of content and then find ideas to write about that have supporting keyword volume and then try to uncover the type of content that rank for those terms.

Because I feel fancy, let’s shoot another video.

That one was definitely longer than I anticipated. Here are the highlights of the video (if you’re too lazy to watch 17 minutes, which I totally respect but also think it’s probably worth your time).

1. Use Ahrefs Top Pages to identify what posts are getting the most traffic for the websites you identified in our sophisticated research

You’ll see we have a lot to go off of. In the video, I explored the Vinyl vs Wood Windows idea and the Window Height from floor idea. These are two topics you can write about that are going to be able to get some traction and traffic while establishing yourself as more of an authority in this market.

2. Go into the keywords explorer to further explore keywords with the same intent of the topic

Let’s take how high should a window be from the floor idea.

You can see it has decent volume and low competition.

You can start to see some keywords to mix in and from this list get an idea of what we could talk about in a piece of content on this topic – standard window height, speak to the code, compare the potential differences in heights of bathroom windows, kitchen windows, egress basement windows, etc.

Sounds like we are really becoming an authority here now.

Really at this point, we are rinsing and repeating.

So let’s recap.

• You have your list of themes.
• You have a list of sites that are authorities in the industry.
• You’ve uncovered potential topics around your themes based on what is working for the competition.
• You have a nice list of topics to actually write about, with keywords to include that are going to actually get traffic.
• Now you have the foundation of a successful content marketing strategy.

I say the foundation of a good content marketing strategy because are missing a pretty significant piece of the puzzle.

That is, now that we know what to write about… how do we know what the final piece of content should/could look like that will actually perform well in the search engines.

If you took the topic idea I outlined here and put up a small 300-word post on your local window repair company website would this actually have a return? I’m not sure. But there is a way to know. You look at what’s performing well now and you sort of reverse engineer what they are doing to create the kind of content that Google is telling you it wants to have on the top page.

Then you go a step further and make your content even better.

Sometimes clients will ask me “can you provide a framework or outline on how to create a successful blog post”. Unfortunately, each blog post is unique. The blueprint or outline or framework however exists already. It’s called positions #1-10 in the SERPs. Read those, learn from them. Make yours similar, but 10x better.