A dedicated blog is one of the best ways to improve SEO rankings for a specific keyword or keywords. Take an e-commerce store selling toys for example. If this store wants to improve their ranking for ‘action figures’, a blog post detailing the best action figures under $20 could be a good idea. More importantly, though, is having a content calendar behind the scenes of that blog. That way, topic ideas are laid out beforehand and the actual blog posts can be created according to schedule. This ultimately promotes consistency. Of course, though, blogging for the sake of blogging is not enough. Instead, blogging should be a strategic activity in that blog topics must be centered around a target keyword that's both relevant and realistic to rank for.
For its SEO-related benefits, one of our clients requested us help them launch a blog on their website. Creating the blog itself was the easy part, however, coming up with topic ideas (based on opportunistic keywords) was a little trickier. For context, the client was an Amish shed builder who also sold outdoor furniture, pavilions, and pergolas.
In order to come up with topics, I did not even necessarily think of topic ideas. Rather, I utilized SEMrush to create a list of around 125 keywords that were relevant to the client’s products. For these keywords to even make the list, my requirement was for them to have at least 100 monthly searches and to be possible to rank for (not too much competition). More specifically, I only added keywords that were between 0-49% keyword difficulty according to SEMrush’s difficulty scale. In addition to this method, I employed general brainstorming and competitor analysis to to compile this keyword list in entirety.
Once I deemed the list to have a sufficient amount of keywords, I dug deeper into the ones that caught my eyes. That is, mainly due to high search volume and reasonable difficulty. In fact, one of my favorite features of SEMrush is that, for an individual keyword, it shows what some of the most popular questions are revolving around the keyword. For instance, one of the keywords I chose to target through this client's blog was 'shed sizes'. According to SEMrush, the most popular question revolving around that keyword was 'what size shed do I need'. Therefore, I cam up with a topic that was titled as the following: The Most Popular Shed Sizes, and Why.
Using the popular questions features was one of the main ways I came up with the actual topic ideas. A similar method I used was through Soovle. This is a tool that, once a seed word or phrase is inputted, it shows phrases containing the seed from various search engines (autosuggest). In total, I came up with 12 topics for each month of the year.
Also, for each topic, I compiled the page title and meta description. See the content calendar attached below.
