You might not call it a blog anymore. We write for clients who use the term “News,” “In the Know,” Knowledge Base,” “Patient Education,” and more. But the process of adding new content to your website on a regular basis is still one of the most effective things you can do for SEO. Whether you write your own content in-house or have a company like Haden Interactive to take care of it for you, choosing blog topics may be one of the challenging parts of the job.
Do you need to choose your topics?
If you write your own blog, you certainly have to make the decisions on what you’ll write about. If you have a blogger, you might leave it up to your web team to make those choices. Even if you don’t choose the topics, though, you might find the insights here useful.
Often, clients will share with us the keywords they want to work on. Keywords are the terms your potential customers use when they look for the goods and services you offer. If you want to see new patients at your concierge medicine practice, you might want people to see your website in the search results when they look for “concierge medicine.” “Concierge medicine” would be the keyword you want to work on. If you sell an app for runners, “running app” might be your choice of keyword.
But one keyword can bring up plenty of different topics. For that running app, you could have posts on any or all of these topics:
- How to choose a running app
- Comparison of five top running apps
- Should you pay for a running app?
- Running apps for new runners
- Best running apps for weight loss
- Can a running app motivate you?
You might choose to provide keywords to your blogger and leave the choice of topics to them.
Topic choice strategy
There are two main approaches to choosing blog topics.
- Matrix of topics
If you want to be very strategic, you can create a matrix of topics designed to reach your target customers all along their path to purchase. You’ll make sure that there are posts for your particular customer group that answer the questions they have when they begin to think about making an appointment or buying your product. You’ll have a few posts that address specific questions you know people have when they think about solutions to the problem you can solve. You might have a “Buy now!” kind of sales page or some seasonal messages.
If you’re taking this approach, think about your entire strategy. Do you want to get links from other webmasters? Make sure you have posts that will appeal to the people you plan to request links from. Will you use highly visual platforms like Pinterest and Instagram? In that case, you will need to plan the visual content for your blog as well as the text.
- Answer every question
Content specialists like Marcus Sheridan and Jay Baer favor answering every possible question. Blogging is not something you do for a couple of weeks. It’s an ongoing process that you should continue with over a period of years. So there’s something to be said for the idea that you can just write useful, informative content over the years without focusing too narrowly on specific topics. Gather questions and concerns from your clients and customers, and use those ideas to build topics.
If this is your preference, you’ll need to have a writer who can respond to events and needs as they arise.
This is a continuum rather than an A/B choice. Your decision about where you should fall of the continuum has to do with your resources and your personality.
If you need help with blogging, that is a service that we provide. We will also be happy to put together a strategy for your in-house bloggers. This will generally improve efficiency as well as results.
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