What are some good topics for a small business blog?
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As business owners, we are often told how important it is to have a blog. Not just to generate qualified leads to our business, but also in order to rank higher on search engines. Today, we wanted to share some tips with you on how to find topics for your small business blog. It’s really quite simple, we’ll learn how to leverage some *free* Google tools and tricks to find relevant topics and to find out how many people search for these topics (although that’s less important).
How to find topics for your small business blog
So to get started, think about some burning questions that your customers or your clients have. What are some pain points that they’re having that they’re going online, they’re researching and they’re finding out some sort of way to solve their problem. Think about just one question for this example. So for example, if I were to use this in our agency, I would think of something like, how to market my business online. Now you can go to Google and type in how to market my business online. You will notice about midway down towards the bottom you should see a section that says “People Also Ask”. Now this will show you other topics relevant to that question that people are also searching for. If you start clicking on some of those questions, what you’ll notice is that more questions get added to the end. So before you know it, you’ll have several topics and sub-topics that you can potentially write about. You already know this can be a win for your business, especially to generate some leads because these are questions that speak directly to your target customer. This is also a great approach to fill your “Top of Funnel” sales pipeline. You can remarket to people who visit these blog posts so that you can serve them ads to come back to your website and take the desired action on your website (but we’ll cover that more in a separate post).
If you write it, they will come.
Now these will give you a good basis of what you can write about on your small business blog that solve your customers or your client’s pain points and these are things that people are already actively searching for. Now, if you want to take that a step further, you can go search for the Google Keyword Planner tool or Google Trends. Plug in the topics you found in the previous step or upload a CSV of those topics you found, and you should see how much search volume each one of those topics generates. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s great to write topics that a lot of people are already searching, however there is a lot of value in writing topics that may not have a lot of search volume. Just because it doesn’t have a lot of search volume today, doesn’t mean that it won’t hold some relevance in the future. Also, because some of your topics may have low search volume just means that you won’t have a lot of competition writing about those topics, not that people are not search for them. In fact, topics need to have a decent amount of volume before they’ll show up in either of these tools. These tools just give you an idea of how many people are actively searching it. It should not really influence your decision on whether you SHOULD write about any of those topics. Ultimately, what you want to do is you want to be providing value. So as you’re thinking of these topics that you can add to your blog, think about what kind of value your potential readers will get from that article or from that blog post that will start a dialog with them and you start to develop trust with your users or your potential clients and readers.
So how will this generate leads for my business?
Simple, if this traffic doesn’t start converting for you right away, they’ll start to come to you for other resources because you’re providing value and they’ll begin to trust you. If you create really great articles around topics your customers are searching for, you’ll start to see the traffic come in naturally. Think about it for a second, ultimately Google’s job is to serve the most relevant content based on what the user is searching for. So with that said, if you’re writing an article based on those customer pain points, and they’re actually taking the time to read the whole article, maybe they’re even clicking through to different parts of your website that shows Google that you have hit the target on the head as far as what they’re searching for. They find value in what you’re providing and you improve your authority and credibility online because people are starting to read those articles, they’re sharing them, they’re clicking through other parts of the website, and that’s Google’s ultimate job, right? So I hope these tips help you in how you can start creating some awesome content for your blog. Feel free to reach out in the comments if you have any additional questions.
