How To Easily Find Traffic Smashing Topic Ideas

Blogging frequently can increase your website traffic, provided that you have the right content strategy. Content marketing and SEO were never isolated fields, and the more you integrate them, the better results you will see.

This post focuses on helping you find content ideas that will smash your website traffic.

1. Configure Intent Into Your Keyword Research

Keyword targeting is an SEO fundamental. People optimize their web pages for certain keywords to drive traffic through them and attract their target audience. Companies use keywords to map and index their web pages, but few use keywords to create and optimize content ideas.

To make the most of keywords in content, you have to understand the intent or queries behind them, so you can create content that answers those queries.

Content that is centred around an existing, persistent query is prequalified. All you have to do is provide a workable, value-adding solution.

Tools That Can Help

a. Google Suggest

When you type in Google’s search bar, the search engine “Suggests” queries by predicting yours and referring to popular searches.

To get content ideas out of the tool, you can include a question word or phrase in your query.

You can also use the * symbol to uncover more ideas. A hack suggested by marketing expert and academic, Nate Shivar.

b. Google Trends

When planning your content calendar for the year, it is good to use Google Trends to verify the areas you want to focus on and the keyword choices you want to make.

Before you publish a blog post it is a good idea to check on and choose the keywords that are currently performing better for your title. Having the right keywords in your title could help you beat higher authority pages.

2. Use Converted Queries On Google Analytics

Sometimes, you see people who have visited your website and converted from very specific queries that show up on your Analytics.

These are rare cases and seem like anomalies, but in marketing, anomalies can help you come up with the best ideas.

You can either use these keywords right away, or plug them into a Google search and see what other ideas spring off of them. You can look at the top results from those searches as inspiration to craft new content ideas.

3. Refer to the best posts on top publications

Every industry has top blogs and publications that can be a great source of topic ideas. Content is the end goal for publishers and the best of them have keyword optimized blog posts based on real industry research that you have easy access to.

You can shortlist posts from top publications that have done well, and reverse-engineer your posts based on that data. To begin, make a list of top publications in your niche. Next, insert their URLs into a backlink checker tool to identify the posts that worked. You can also use social share counters on blogs to make that judgement.

Tools that can help

a. Ahrefs

Ahrefs gives you backlinks, anchor text and social shares of posts of any website. You can also use it to find the most popular posts for a certain topic.

b. GrowthBot

GrowthBot is a slightly unconventional tool being built by HubSpot Founder Dharmesh Shah. I use GrowthBot via Slack, but you can also use it via Facebook Messenger.

You can ask the tool questions like “What are the top posts on xyz.com?” and use the results as inspiration for your content ideas.

4. Rework Existing Heroes

You already have a great source of content ideas – your website. Based on your track record, there already exists data pointing to content that works and doesn’t for you. That’s why monitoring your analytics becomes that important for you.

You can refer to your landing page insights on Google Analytics to identify your top landing page, by number of visits and time interval of visits.

Say you identify a guide that gave you a lot of visits, you can split that guide into smaller sections, or write something along the sames lines.

You can also repurpose the guide into different formats of content to post on your blog, social pages or external sites to drive traffic back to yours.

Tools That Can Help

a. Google Analytics

You can use Google Analytics to find your top landing pages for content ideas.

b. Venngage

Infographics are widely known for generating tons of shares and backlinks. You could turn one of your top posts into an infographic.

5. Visit Popular Forums

To answer people’s questions, you first have to find them. Discussion forums are a great place to start. You can also work with the comments section of just about any blog.

The idea is to find questions that a lot of people want answered and then answer it on your blog. You can share the link for reference after, where the questions have been asked.

Tool That Can Help

a. FAQ fox

It isn’t easy to scour the internet looking for questions to answer. Instead, you can insert links on FAQ fox and type in your search term and get a list of questions that have been asked instantly.

Wrap

That concludes this list to help find traffic smashing ideas. The process doesn’t have to be a hassle at all. All you require is the right methods and tools to make it easy.

^{* Adapted lead image:  Public Domain, pixabay.com via getstencil.com}