Researching Ideas For Website Content

Your website’s “bread and butter” pages are typically the most profitable, and therefore, the most important pages on your website. Because you know your business best, coming up with the content for these pages is natural. But these pages can’t possibly do all the heavy lifting. The supporting pages should help provide more in-depth information and address niches in your industry or marketplace. When you’re ready to add supporting and equally interesting content to your website, there are many places to go for ideas.

Primary Goals Of Website Content

Outside of the obvious, which is increasing traffic and interactions, (conversions), the main goals of content are to attract, entertain, influence, and or educate the reader. Keeping this in mind, each page of your website should have unique material that focuses on just one or two main keywords or topics. Also, before you start writing a bunch of pages, ensure that there’s a content strategy in place. (This is where a Content Strategist can help.) If you have a strategy, then researching ideas for website content will be both fun and fruitful. Come up with creative ideas that will set you apart from competitors and engage your audience.

Ideas Begin With Knowing Your Target Audience

Research ideas to develop website content requires an understanding of your target audience. Large corporations can afford to purchase qualitative and quantitative data. They can also afford focus groups to gain knowledge about their customers. But, these costs are often unrealistic options for others. As a small business that needs to identify its target audience, here are some things that you can do.

Gather data and learn more about your target audience:

• • Research the Internet
  • Conduct Surveys
  • Do Keyword Research
  • Interact on Social Media
  • Do a Competitive Analysis
  • Analyze Search Entries

 

Use Free Tools:

• • Google Analytics
  • Google Trends
  • Google Correlate
  • Google Forms
  • Google Keyword Planner
  • SEMrush Free Tools
  • SurveyMonkey Free Tools

 

Keyword Gap Analysis

In addition to regular keyword research, a keyword gap analysis is super helpful. Although it’s typically and SEO function, it can also help unveil keywords that are relevant to your niche audience and overall goals. Identify competitor strengths and weaknesses. These make great ideas and can also help search optimization for your page! The best tools for keyword gap analysis are shown below, although you may find others that don’t require a subscription.

• SEMrush Keyword Gap Tool allows you to compare up to (5) competitors
• Ahref Content Gap Tool to access a long list of keywords that you missed
• MOZ Competition Keyword tool can compare two sites and find keywords
• SPyFu may be the most reasonably priced and offers a ton of info

• Brainstorm With Your Team

  The same tools and actions that you would use for understanding your target audience will also help generate ideas for content writing. Seriously, when you visit the bullet points noted above, you’ll begin to formulate ideas for new content. Most tools offer results that can be downloaded, which is a nice feature. After you’ve printed off the findings, experiment with creative thinking techniques. Conduct a team brainstorming session. Don’t forget to add a privacy policy as part of the content development. Ask questions and entertain opposing views. Collaborate with your team. Seriously, folks, collaboration is key. With the mixture of expertise and different viewpoints, the information at hand increases tenfold. It’s just a great way to generate new ideas and improve logical thinking.

• Use AI-Generated Ideas

  Using AI tools for content ideas is picking up momentum and is worth checking out!

  Researching Ideas Is An On-Going Effort

  Researching ideas, analyzing data, and collaborating with team members should be an ongoing effort. This kind of information will help solidify ideas for content and can also be helpful for decisions about other marketing decisions such as paid ad campaigns. Over time, you will gain a more complete picture of your audience. You’ll be more successful at developing creative content that aligns with that audience and speaks to them in a satisfying way.

  If you need more assistance researching ideas for your website, contact  Leaning Tree Marketing for more help.