Whether we’re running a business or a blog, as website owners we all have that same thought – what can we do to get more traffic to our site without blowing the budget out the water?

Content!

Creating new content can help increase traffic to your site. It’s not all about quantity though, the key here is creating consistently great quality content to drive organic visits by answering high search volume terms, phrases and audience needs. The important thing with content marketing is to find out what your audience is searching for on Google. If you can crack that, you’re onto a winner. To do this you need to ensure you do your research properly to ensure the content is really right for your target market and taps into their search behaviour.

The Process

Here is a simple process you can follow that will help you find out what people are searching for in your industry.

Top tip: If you have an e-commerce site that sells a variety of products, we would take one category/ section of your site at a time. Pick the most important or most popular category within your business.

1. Choosing Top Level Keywords

Using generic top level keyword research, pick out a handful of keywords around your chosen area.

2. Conducting Research

Using sites like Answer the Public, Quora, and Yahoo Answers, enter one of your generic keywords and hit enter. (For example purposes, we have chosen to use Answer the Public).

From here you can gain a variety of questions people are searching for, such as ‘how tos’ or ‘what is?’ types of questions.

3. What’s the Search Volume?

As you cannot gain the search volume behind these phrases, we input them into Google’s keyword planner to gauge how often they are being searched for and what the popular topics are.

4. Cluster Results

Once you have your list of user queries, you can then group them together with similar questions. If you have one particular phrase that has a lot of monthly searches, it may warrant its own guide or article without having to group them with other phrases.

5. Competitor Research

Before going ahead and creating your content, it will be good to head over to your competitors’ sites to see if they are covering that particular question or topic. This is to see what you are up against, if your competition isn’t answering these questions, you will know you will have a good chance of ranking well. You can use tools such as Buzzsumo or SEM Rush to see what is being written about within your chosen subject so you can make sure you are creating something unique.

Top tip: If you are doing this for an e-commerce site, you may wish to group your phrases together and create an FAQ that covers all questions.

6. Create your content!

Whether you’re creating an article, a guide, FAQ, a video or a blog post, the options are endless! Just make sure whatever you create is well optimised for the search query and include other variants of keywords that you came across in your research.

You don’t have to create lots of different content pieces to achieve that extra bit of traffic you are looking for. Create something that is in the customer’s interest and something they are looking for. By following the above steps you will be able to find something to give to your audience and increase your traffic without blowing the budget.

What’s your process for gaining content ideas? Let us know in the comments.