This is an update of a post I wrote in 2020. It simply keeps coming up more and more as I sit with clients and prospects lately. One of the most common questions I get from clients is “What do I write about?”. SEO success relies on good, and unique content. Google’s job is to provide the best source and answer for user search queries. As Google evolves, they begin to look at your pages and even the entire site as entities that have power in certain subject areas.
Build Topic Auhority
To help build your strength in important subject areas you want to rank for, you need to create great supporting information that helps answer all of your visitor’s questions. It not only provides a better user experience (UX), which Google says is the #1 ranking factor, but it also helps remove the obstacles that prevent customers from hiring you. Providing that information gives them more security that they are in the right place and won’t be met with surprises.
Even more with Google updates this year it is important for your site, and even you the business owner, as an author, to have topic authority. The best way to gain topic authority for you and your site is to generate quality content that your customers (and thus Google) views as useful and relevant. The more Google sees your site provides this solid relevant content on your topic area, the more the algorithm will prefer you as the provider of the right answers for user searches. Understanding your topic area as an entity and what to write about can be key for your future success in SEO. Free tools like the one below can be great resources to come up with these topics. We have been using these to help clients with posts for some time now and it breathes life into sites that were dropping in rankings.
Sometimes we get a little too close to our own work and struggle with coming up with what your client and prospect questions are, even though the FAQ page has been around for years. Now though, it is helpful to expand on those questions and help lead your users down the sales funnel. Think of all of the problems that your different products or services solve and what questions are asked that can start people down your sales funnel. Then pave their path to finding and hiring you.
Use “People Also Ask” for Supporting Content
One great tip to come up with supporting content is to use Google’s “People Also Ask” information. They are just handing you other questions your potential customers have asked for free. It is free market research. Answering those questions and presenting them in a well designed and easy to use information architecture, can help pave your way to SEO success in your subject areas. You’d be surprised to see all of the questions people ask. Some of them are clearly not something you want to dive into, but if you start farming for these PAA’s around your core keywords you are targeting, and then write content that answers them, that is a great way to improve your standing. Remember to link back to your core product and service pages when you mention them in your blog post or deeper content.
Tool to Help with PAA (and other SEO tasks)
One great tool I use to download PAA’s in volume is the SEO Minion Chrome extension. This is a great tool that pops up on your search results page and will allow you to download many PAA’s for each search query into a spreadsheet. The updated version even provides a question tree with different levels that may help you with how to structure your information architecture. This is a great way to mine this information and feed your blog post or content writing needs for quite some time. If you have 4 core services and grab 200 for each basic service search, you will have plenty of content to work on for some time. Even if only a quarter of them are great fodder for a page of content, it is still great fuel for you.
When you start to organize your content, group it into clear sub-categories. You may have questions that fall in different stages of your sales funnel. Some questions are asked before the customer even knows that you are the solution to their problem, while others are more to clarify what you might offer in terms of more specific differentiation of your products or services and how they might fit better to their specific issue. Once you can get the information organized and linking in a clear way from page to page, you can craft a sales journey for your visitors. Remember to link them all back to your core service page.
All of this can be done on your own to help your SEO presence. If you need assistance though, we can help step in, adding writers and tools that help you frame your answers. What key terms is Google expecting to appear in your content? We have the tools to help with this and can give input on how to structure your answer for the best UX (user experience) and ranking best practices. Give us a call. We’ve been doing it for 15 years and specialize in small businesses, so we understand using your limited budget in the most efficient way possible.
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