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Getting ideas for writing content can be tough and many people struggle at this stage of the game. While only you can figure out what content will accomplish your search engine optimization goals, there are a few things you can do to get the creative juices flowing. First, think of your website in terms of some very broad themes, and then think of the different ways that you might be able to present those themes as content. Content can be classified in many ways, and thinking about the style you can write in may shake some ideas loose and start you down a path. Below are a few broad types that you can refer back to when you need that spark.
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1. Educational pieces can be used to show your users how to do something or teach them something they didn't know before. You can take a statistic, a fact, or a figure from your industry and expand upon it, offering value from the perspective of an expert opinion. You can get technical and focus on details or advanced topics that appeal to savvy users or other industry experts.
2 Procedural content can be a step by step how to type of article that walks a visitor through a certain process. Informational content doesn't have to be groundbreaking or Pulitzer prize winning. Just putting up a page of driving directions to your store, or biographies of your key executive team, are both content opportunities that may be missing from your pages.
3. News is simply an informational page that references something that happened in a moment in time. This could be industry news that you're reporting on, or commenting on, or it could be company news about who you've hired, or a recap of the conference that you've just hosted or attended. All of these can be applied to a broad array of themes, and there are certainly many more not included in this list. It might help to have your target keyword list in front of you as you run through these ideas. The combination of specific phrases and types of content can often be the source of a great idea.
4. The second thing you can do as a source of inspiration is scan your competitors to see if you're missing something or if there's a hole out there that you can fill. Do a quick search on some of your keywords and click on some of your competitors. You can spend time on their sites and take a look at their blogs or the FAQ sections. What kinds of things are they writing about? Are there categories that you can offer a new unique insight into? Are there hot topics that you can expand on, or burning questions that you can answer?
Or look to a tool like Answer the Public, or the plug in tool Keywords Everywhere to get additional insights into what people want to know about a given topic or query. You can also take a look at your competition in social media. What are they tweeting and posting about? Maybe they got the industry scoop that you missed and that might be something right for a commentary piece.
For more information on how to create good content, get in touch with our team at: info@ballantineconsulting.co.uk