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Your blog: one of the most important tools you own
Creating data-driven blog content doesn’t have to be as hard and time-consuming as many business owners think it is! There are a myriad of opportunities to enforce your domain expertise by offering the most current trends and information in your industry. It will improve your SEO and Google rankings. It adds value to the customer experience on your website. It conveys your company’s voice to the customer quickly and honestly.
Here are the results our customers have seen after implementing data-driven blog content strategies:
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Jumping from not ranking on the first 3 pages to gaining position zero with a snippet
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10 conversions from one blog post in 3 months
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$4,300 revenue from bookings for a blog page in 3 months
In this day and age, it isn’t enough to just have an active blog. Your blog has to be original, creative, valuable, and customized to your audience. Need a place to start? Here are four tools you can use to create original blogs that are tailored to your customers.
Google Search Console
To start, you’ll need to understand what content your customers are actively searching for. There is no need to shoot in the dark about what queries your market is searching online. Google Search Console gives you insight into the keywords that drove visits to your site over the last 90 days, and this list is a vast sea of opportunity. Sometimes, you can be too close to your company to actually realize all of the topics you could potentially write about. Analyzing Google Search Console will help you understand some topics your company is relevant for that may not have crossed your mind yet. Many google searches are even in sentence form, so you can gain some specificity in your topics (we call these “long-tail keywords.”) For example, a rafting company may see that people are searching the term “can you go rafting if you don’t know how to swim?” This could be a great title for a valuable rafting blog. It answers the question that customers are asking.
Reviews
Experiencing writer’s block? Read your customer reviews! Analyze why customers love your company, why they choose to support your company, and what they want to see more of, and then create that content. There can be some great actionable ideas written in those reviews. If many customers are mentioning a specific problem that your company solved, that is a great topic for a blog. Maybe you notice a pattern of multiple customers talking about how they had an amazing bachelor party on your tour. Write a blog about how to plan an awesome bachelor party! Are a lot of your satisfied customers coming with their family? Write the ultimate family vacation guide! Let your customers tell you what they care about, and let them know that you are listening.
Non-Direct Competitors
Remember that age-old advice: surround yourself with the people you want to be in 5 years. It will eventually make you a better person, or at least a better blogger. Don’t worry, it isn’t stealing if you make it better, it’s improving! Find the most successful company in your industry (preferably far away from you) and look at their blog. What topics are people reacting to the most? How could you take that blog topic and tailor to your location? Or could you change a broad topic so it is tailored to your target audience? The key is to take an idea and make it more valuable, creative, or specific.
3 Companies That Make Killer Content:
Online Contact Forms
Have you ever conducted an analysis on your contact forms? Chances are, your customers are asking a lot of the same questions. Even if a question has only been asked once, it is likely to be asked again in the future. This is a great way to find valuable ideas for “Frequently Asked Questions” blog content, and a fantastic way to let customers know you are listening. Individuals are going out of their way to get this information from you – they have intent to purchase if you tell them what they want to hear. Jump ahead and make sure this information is readily available and visible on your website.
So, if you’re thinking about how to optimize your content strategy in 2018 (and if you’re not you should be), consult Google Search Console, read your reviews, follow your non-direct competitors, and analyze your online contact forms. Those 4 acts alone will deliver enough well-tailored blog ideas to fill up your editorial calendar for months to come.
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