Brand Awareness: How to Get Free and Effective Content Ideas
A page with a good application of on-page SEO and quality content is a search engine’s currency. These contents can be delivered and repurposed across several platforms. Some pages took years to appear on the first page of SERPs (unless you paid for it), while others took months. This is one of the reasons why a brand should have a long-term strategy for having relevant content that interacts with each other to help elevate the brand.
Content strategy is more than just a content calendar; it is a comprehensive approach that supports business objectives. Before diving into the content ideas, let’s review the type of content we want to develop.
Type of Content
Typical content can be grouped into these different categories to identify the elements that are appropriate to the content. By adding the size of the content, then the average reading time — we can be reminded that the reader’s attention is very limited and it is important to consider these in early content development planning and align them with the type of content we want to develop. How to deliver our message is as important as the quality of the message that we are sending.
Matching User Intentions and Company Goals
After selecting the type of content to be used, we must determine what searcher intent should be targeted. In other words, we must match the content to the user’s intent. There are four primary search intents:
- Conduct Search Information (Informational)
- Go to a specific website (Navigational)
- Clarify things till you’re sure. (Commercial)
- Accomplish something (Transactional)
Problem statement: Come up with content ideas about a company that outsources and augments IT services. The website’s objective is to:
- Present company profile, our values, and culture as a distributed team (informational)
- Allow the potential applicant to verify our existence as a legit and secured company (navigational)
- Share why working with our company can be the best career choice (commercial)
- Show our job vacancies and provide an easy way to apply (transactional)
Having accomplished these two: Identifying the type of content we want to develop and revisiting website objectives, we need to review three important ideas that will expand our awareness of how to position better our content in the world of knowledge graph :
- A Knowledge Graph is a representation of the interconnectedness of all entities once user queries are processed.
- Topical Authority is a state where a website achieved a stable position for its brand. This can be accomplished by employing a broad network of keywords and incorporating them into high-quality content.
- Keyword Clustering and Topical Maps. This is where we actually plan and organize the content of our website. By definition, keyword clusters are collections of terms that have related meanings, similar intent, or synonymous queries. These are the raw data to achieve topical authority.
Keyword Clustering and Topical Maps
The expansion of keywords is helpful to speak the language of a semantic search engine. Prior to semantic search, there was a lexical search in which the search engine looks for literal matches of the query terms or variants of them without understanding the broader meaning of the question. Now, search engines are able to extract different meanings from user queries.
The main target of the website is quality candidates that share their company values and goals. The keyword “remote work” or “remote job” is a good start.
Out of curiosity, I added both words in google Trends to figure out which one has a higher search volume, from its results the “remote work” has a high volume of searches in our area from the previous months.
We are not trying to rank the word “remote work” YET, instead, we are trying to come up with possible topics around our base keyword. We will be exploring the results from the related topics of the image result page, google and youtube autosuggest, images entities, and inputs from PAA boxes(people also asked)
Related Topic in Image Search Result
Google is mostly copying its entities from existing knowledge bases. Aside from the SERP knowledge panel, the related topic or category shown in the image search result page has the potential to describe the category of a specific entity surrounding our queries. Bill Slawski explains more in this post.
Google and Youtube Autosuggest
When you begin typing a query into the search bar, Google will automatically populate a list of suggestions. These suggestions are coming from real people and are based on the most popular queries.
Add the suggestions from Google and Youtube in a spreadsheet, get all suggestions that make sense to the company, and analyze the type of intention are they trying to convey, and at what level are they in their search journey. You can expand the suggestion by adding another word to the query, but for the purpose of this example, I’ll be using the suggestions derived from the base query “remote work”.
People Also Asked
People Also Ask is a Google rich-snippet feature that shows the searcher more information related to their initial query. This is another query from a real person processed by the search engine to provide more information.
We can also use the AlsoAsked website to expand PAA knowledge.
Add everything in a spreadsheet, filter, and examine the intention of each query. Adding the “level of importance” column will help us identify our priority. It is a great input to filter and narrow down the content that we. want to develop.
Entity Explorer is a free tool made for entity research and visual entity maps that can help create more authoritative information. Add all the values from Google auto-suggest and PAA to EntityExplorer and copy the entities or keywords that are significant to the company.
We can now have a variety of related keywords associated with Google autosuggest results and PAA insights. We can also call it a related keyword around the topic. In psychology, it is safe to assume that what we are doing is called semantic priming.
Combining all our processes, we will arrive at a decent content topic that can be used within 2 months. Our goal is to achieve authority using the methods we presented. You can refine this process until you arrive at the content title you wish to cover.
Here is the possible content ideas for our new website:
Summary
To complete our content planning, I added other SEO essential information for meta tags and structured data inspired by the work of Mike Ginley.
This might be a conservative approach, but seeing results from our initial effort will give us more calculated opportunities in the future. Since the company isn’t known yet, the need to establish familiarity and positive relationships (informational queries) is very high. In the law of persuasion, we can’t convince someone to take action if our target audience is not familiar with the entity he or she is negotiating.
Using the free and native approach to content planning, we tried to develop different content ideas from a single query. Access my working spreadsheet here. These content ideas can be repurposed and distributed to social media platforms, and job posting sites — hopefully, generate decent traffic to our website.
