An overview of how you can use Moz, Google Trends and Google Search Console to help inform what topics your firm should be writing about.
There are a lot of insights you can get from SEO tools to inform your firm’s content marketing efforts. But where can you find this data and how exactly should you use it? If your firm is serious about improving your website’s SEO performance, we recommend investing time, and potentially $$, in some tools to help you do so. In addition to helping your firm get smarter about how to best optimize your site, these tools can offer insights to help determine what you should be writing about.
In this post, we take a look at Moz, Google Trends and Google Search Console and share ways you can use each tool to come up with content ideas.
How to use Moz to inform what you should be writing about
Moz is marketing software that offers SEO tools with features like keyword research, link research, and page optimization insights to give you a view of where your website ranks in search results and recommendations for how to improve your ranking. Here’s what you can do within Moz to help you determine what your firm should be writing about.
Explore keywords
There are several ways you can use Moz’s Keyword Research tool to inform your content initiatives. In their Ranking Keywords section, you can type in your domain or page to see what keywords are ranking for that page. If there is a keyword you would like to be ranking for, but aren’t, or you aren’t in a top position for a keyword you want to be ranking for, this could be a topic you want to consider building up a body of content around.
You can also use their Explore by Keyword section to enter a keyword, topic or phrase to get a performance assessment of the word and related keyword suggestions. This will help you determine if the phrase is something worth writing about (i.e. does it get sufficient search volume, is there a lot of competition around the word, etc.). You can also see the top-ranking websites that appear in search results for a keyword so you can explore websites that are performing well. Related keyword suggestions also offers additional topics to consider writing about.
Assess your competitors
With Moz’s Link Explorer you can see what pages on competitor sites are getting the most links and where they are coming from. This can offer insights into what topics and types of content might resonate with your audience. Their Link Opportunities tool within Open Site Explorer can also let you see what sites are linking to your competitors, but not to your site.
Analyze mentions
Moz’s Fresh Web Explorer tool can help you find and analyze mentions of your brand, your competitors, and any other topic on the web. This can give you insights into what people are saying about your firm and help you see what type of content is earning attention for your competitors.
How to use Google Trends and Google Search Console to inform what you should be writing about
Google Trends and Google Search Console are free services offered through Google. Google Trends analyzes the popularity of search queries in Google Search and compares the volume of searches over time. Google Search Console helps you monitor, maintain and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results. It also tracks the highest-traffic search queries and pages that brought people to your site. Here is how you can use both tools to help your firm determine what to write about.
Google Trends
You can use Google Trends to see exactly that—what topics are trending. To use it to help you determine what to write about, start by typing in a keyword to see the interest in that keyword over time. You can then compare variations of that keyword to see which version of the keyword has the most interest. This can help you make sure you’re focusing your content around the right keyword.
When using Google Trends it’s important to note the difference between terms and topics. Search terms show matches for all terms in the language you’re using, while topics are groups of terms across languages. For instance, if you search “content marketing” as a term, it will return results like “content marketing calendar” and “content marketing tips.” If you search “content marketing” as a topic, it will include results like “content marketing conferences 2019.”
Google Search Console
You can use Google Search Console to see which search queries bring people to your site and analyze your site’s impressions, clicks and position in Google. There are several ways you can use this information to determine what topics you should be writing about and to make sure your existing content continues to perform well.
If you notice that your site’s search ranking is decreasing for a certain query, it might be time to start writing more on that topic to boost your position again. To see your site’s rank for queries, start by clicking “Performance,” then “Query.” Click “Date Range” and chose the time period you wish to look at, then click “Compare” and select two equal time periods and click “Apply.” If you select 28 days as your time period, for example, the results will show your site’s position in the last 28 days and the 28 days before that. You can use these two rankings to see if you’re site’s rankings have increased or decreased for each query.
You can identify your highest-traffic queries, meaning the search terms that bring the most people to your site. Google Search Console will show you what pages are clicked on for the search term to bring people to your site, and you can consider better optimizing these pages, updating them to make sure they maintain their position and possibly link them to lower-ranked (but still important) pages of your site to keep people on your site longer.
At the same time, if you notice there are terms that your site isn’t ranking for, that could inform you that it’s time to start building a body of content around that topic.
Closing Thoughts
Moz, Google Trends and Google Search Console have a lot of insights that can be mined to help you determine what your next blog post topic should be about, or what topic your firm should start to build a body of content around. If your firm is serious about SEO as well, consider Moz. While it does require a financial investment, it offers powerful tools that can go a long way in improving your site’s overall performance in search results. If you’re not ready to make a financial investment, Google’s free tools offer plenty of valuable insights to inform your content calendar, as well as opportunities to improve SEO. Taking the time to learn each tool does require a bit of a time investment as well, but the investment is worth it if you want to be more strategic about how your firm approaches content and SEO.
