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How to Research for a Blog Post? [Updated]

Researching to create an impressive blog post can be a difficult task as there’s so much content on the internet that sometimes it feels like a topic has been covered 100 times before.

In this article, I’ll discuss 4 steps to research for a blog post to create a unique and high-quality piece of content for your website along with the ways to rank it higher in the SERPs.

Step I: How to research the title for a blog post?

Before writing a post, you should create an impressive title that will generate links. To refine the title, you need to create one that people search the most. I like to determine that through several different ways:

Use the “suggest” feature by Google to learn about the query that people search the most on the search engine. This will help you fine-tune your title and create a couple of options and narrow them down to one using Google Trends.

Judging by these two “Google suggest” screenshots, “How to do research for a blog post” appears to be the better choice because it appears higher on the list. However, if we are choosing it as a title, then we need to be sure that it’s the right choice, so let’s run these two titles through Google Trends. We can compare them and find out the most suitable title with higher search volume.

It is evident that ‘How to research for a blog post’ is a better title.

Sometimes when you research for new topics, you can face this message on Google Trends.

This means that your queries do not enough search volume to analyze and decide upon the better one. When you are stuck in this situation, you should either reconsider the topic or check the phrasing.

For instance, I will be checking the phrasing of the two sentences that I’ve chosen:
– How to do research for a blog post
– How to research for a blog post

And the phrases will be ‘how to do research’, and ‘how to research’.

It looks like removing the word ‘do’ drives more traffic. Even though Google ‘suggest’ results showed that including ‘do’ in the title was the right choice. But trends clarify that those types of searches attract low traffic.

So, after running the titles through this process, the appropriate one is ‘how to research for a blog post’. And therefore, I chose it as the title of my blog.

Step II: Analyzing your competition

You may already have an outline of the topics you will discuss in your blog post, but if you want your content to rank well, then you should analyze other sites and the related content they’ve covered.

What I like to do is perform a Google search for my title term and take a close look at the top five results. I review them and make sure that my blog covers the various angles about the topic from those results combined. 

After reviewing those pages, you’ll have a good list of angles to discuss in your posts. Once you have those angles laid out, it’s time to begin with the research!

Step III: Research Process

The most apparent research material are those five pages against which you are competing. Feel free to talk about the same things, but also add your opinion and knowledge. And remember, do not copy and paste their work; otherwise, your website will receive Google’s penalty. 

I like performing a search for each topic that I discuss in my blogs, and check what ranks well for those topics. Then, I note down the key concepts from those pages and expand upon it in every section of my post. If you do this correctly, the subsections of your blog post will start ranking well for their section headers.

Interviewing an expert is another excellent way to find unique information about a topic. The best part of the interview is that you can turn it into content for your blog post. You can conduct interviews on Skype or email an expert a bunch of questions and quote his or her responses in your blog post.

Apart from that, you can use books as well. Believe it or not, people who write books tend to know a lot about the subject on which they are writing. You should read a book on your chosen topic to gain a more in-depth insight. This way, you’ll know more than most of the competition by the time you are through. Also, you can quote the author in your blog post and provide more value to the reader.

Step IV: Search Engine Optimization

You can research and create an impressive post filled with information and data that is valuable to the reader, but it all sinks if your content doesn’t receive traction. So, to make your content discoverable and ranked higher in the SERPs, it’s necessary to optimize it for the search engine.

You should start by creating a database of keywords related to your chosen topic. There are various keyword research tools available on the internet. You can use those tools for keyword suggestions. Also, remember to add keywords with a mix of high search volume and low search volume; plus, short-tail and long-tail keywords.

Apart from that, you should conduct keyword research on your competitors and learn about the keywords that they target in their post. You can use those keywords to your keyword database as well and outrank them in the SERPs.

After the database has been created, you should start working on placing the keywords across your content organically. The crucial elements under this process are:

  1. Title tag
  2. Heading tags
  3. Alt tags
  4. Meta Description

These tags need to be optimized with the keywords because the search engine spider crawls these elements and index the pages accordingly. Also, you should place these keywords in the content body and master on-page optimization.

Keyword research and optimization can get your site indexed and ranked in the SERPs, but you need to improve its rankings; therefore, you should begin building links for your blog post. You can seek guest posting opportunities from other websites and link your post in those guest articles. Also, you can share your post on social media platforms or build links through blog commenting.

Conclusion

When writing about any topic, it is important to optimize for terms that are searched most in the SERPs. This will boost your blog post’s SERP visibility and allow it to receive more traction. To ensure your post ranks well in search engines, you should conduct an SEO audit to make sure that your site does not suffer from issues containing it from ranking well. Plus, you should research on your chosen topic comprehensively and make sure that your content provides value to the readers.

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