Ideas for content
-
Where do you get your ideas to create content for a blog? I have been using the new keyword planner and am not coming up with any ideas. We are an e-commerce site that deals with commercial equipment. It is hard for me to show anything interesting with products because the company does not own it.
-
Why don't you write about how the equipment is being used. How it solved a problem. Perhaps a case study on how a client used it and how it improved their business. That way it is irrelevant on various models or even the same model. People love seeing how equipment can solve problems. If well written your clients will love it and perhaps put the case study up on their website and link it back to you.
-
That is what I will probably try. My only concern is if it is worthwhile. Some of our terms are low search volume. Is it worth writing a post if it has a low search amount?
-
In dealing with industrial equipment we have things like boilers. They cost thousands of dollars, and since we do surplus a lot of times we will only have one. So doing a lot of content on a single item is tough. I am looking at doing a category, but I don't have a lot of knowledge. Do you happen to know if I can cannibalize whats already in search? For instance we sell widgets and the widget category page ranks well. If I write an informative post about widgets, will it hurt my other results?
-
Then you can be the first to blaze a path, and not have as much competition! Write about the most unusual piece of industrial equipment you've had for sale, explain some of the common types of equipment, explain things in everyday language.
A similar, though not exact example from my life a week or so ago. My husband is looking to pick up silkspan in large rolls and have it cut into squares to resell. The term for this is "sheeting", but that word can mean so many things that it was of no help online. I could find plenty of equipment to do this, but I didn't want to buy something from Alibaba, I wanted to find a service to do this. I finally found one site that actually talked about doing this, and included the magic phrase of "paper converting". From there, I got what I needed.
Even if you don't have the exact same model for sale twice, can you write about the overall category of equipment?
-
A lot of the blog posts and articles that I publish are about objects and products that I do not own. If I believe a blog post about that object or product would be valuable I don't hesitate to spend $10, $50 and sometimes $100 to purchase the item for testing, photos and the ability to speak directly about my experience with the item. I have several articles where several hundred dollars was spent on items for testing, photos and experience.
If you have worthwhile content ideas, don't hesitate to invest in them. When you have great photos and an author who can speak from experience then you have kickass content as long as you can write effectively.
-
We work with industrial equipment, so it very rarely trends on anything. We are in a huge industry but nobody is doing any sort of content well. Not quite sure what direction to go since it seems like uncharted territory.
-
Without owning any item, and without having any knowledge of the product, it makes it tough.
We have a great youtube channel that has over 100k views, and photos are provided by customers so I can't get extras.
-
I was the phone person for awhile. So anything that people asked I have put up in either our About Us section or Frequently Asked Question area. We have an extremely wide variety of things on our site but we don't own any of them, so I have never even seen a product we sell which makes it difficult.
-
One method I've found successful is to leverage what is being discussed on different social media platforms. Through using Google Plus and what is trending on twitter (as well as others), you can discover relevant topics relating to your industry and utilize those topics to create content that is more likely to be shared or visited. See what other companies within your industry are having success posting as an idea.
-
Tell people how to select your products, how to use them full advantage.
Visit a business that uses your product. See what advice they would give.
Take photos and videos... use them to explain upsells.
-
My first stop would e to talk to the person (or people) who answers your phones. What questions do they get? What do people want to know about the product? What do they get tired of answering all the time that you could write about?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to promote your blog content
Hi there, we've been blogging for a while now. Some of our content ranks quit well, other posts don't seem to be ranking at all. The weird thing (I think it's weird...) is that we recently published a post and focussed on a phrase that competes with over 400 million indexed pages, and after 3 weeks we're on page 3, and for other posts with only 2.5 million indexed pages we rank past page 5 (ok, this post is already 1,5 year old, does this matter?). To give you some background info, we moved our blog in January in a new subdomain, and redirected the old url's, but didn't actively promote the old posts. Would promoting the old articles through social media help us boost the rankings for these articles (the articles are "best practices", "how-to's", ...). Where / how do you promote your content after you published it on your blog? I find it hard posting in LinkedIn groups related to finance while I have the "online marketing manager" title on my profile. Why would a finance professional read an article shared by a marketing dude? As LinkedIn's API doensn't allow to post into groups anymore, do you actually go through all your relevant groups every time you publish a new blog to share the article?
Content Development | | jorisbrabants1 -
Why do other sites rank higher for our blog content?
Our site has always allowed other sites to RSS feed our content. Recently, we've noticed that searches for a title of our blog post will rank 2 sites that only publish said content, while our links are nowhere to be seen on the SERPs for Google. Is there any way I can fix this or prod Google to adjust it for us? Background: We were ranked highly in many long tail keywords, but lost many of them in June 2013. During this time going forward, we received no manual action.
Content Development | | FreedomKeepsMe0 -
Can I share share my content with other sites either as a individual post or RSS or will I be encourage duplicate content on the web and upset Google
Hi, I have a new site http://www.homeforbusiness.co.uk. I want to encourage traffic to the site by sharing some of my content with other related websites which have a higher PR ranking and traffic for a link to my site. Is this going to upset Google re-duplicate content and devalue my site and stop any organic rankings in the future? Equally some high PR sites which have a good synergy with mine such as http://thewomensbusinessclubs.com/ allow me to add my RSS feed with their blog network. Is this a good thing to do or not for the same reasons as above? Or can I only do the above my creating fresh content? Thanks, Elizabeth Conley
Content Development | | econley0 -
Possible to recover from Thin/Duplicate content penalties?
Hi all, first post here so sorry if in wrong section. After a little advice, if I may, from more experienced SEOers than myself with regards to writing off domains or keeping them. To cut a long story short I do a lot of affiliate marketing, back in the day (until the past 6 months or so) you could just take a merchant's datafeed and with some SEO outrank them for individual products. However, since the Google Panda update this hasn't worked as well and now it's much hard to do - which is better for the end user. The issue I have is that I got lazy and tried to see if I could still get some datafeeds to rank with only duplicate content. The sites ranked very well at first but after a couple of weeks died massively. They went from 0 to 300 hits a day in a matter of 24 hours and back to 2 hits a day. The sites now not rank for anything which is obviously because they are duplicate content. The question I have is are these domains dead, can they be saved? Not talking about duplicate content but as a domain itself. I used about 10 domains to test things, they ranged from DA 35 to DA 45 - one of the tests being can a domain with reasonable DA rank for duplicate content. Seeing as the test didn't work I want to use the domains for proper sites with proper unique content, however so far although the new unique content is getting indexed it is suffering from the same ranking penalties the duplicate (and now deleted content) pages had. Is it worth trying to use these domains, will Google finally remove the penalty when they notice that the bad content is no longer on the site or are the domains very much dead? Many thanks
Content Development | | ccgale0 -
Help with Content Revamp
Many years ago we wrote about 60 content pages for our surfboard e-commerce website targeting all the top popular keywords. Many of them generic but very keyword focused. We are now revamping our content our our site and want to move away from the generic side of things and actually rewrite all the pages to make them very useful and actually stuff our customers can really use and will find very helpful. I noticed that many times we wrote small pages less than 500 words that target similar keywords around a general theme. In looking at the analytics all the pages are getting a good amount of traffic and ranking well but im wondering would it be ok to focus on a main topic and combine similar pages if they are related? So i can take the say 60 articles and combine it down to say 10 articles and make the articles cover alot more stuff instead of just being small 500 word articles. As an example we have many surfboard models so we wrote an article for -Longboard Surfboards -Funboard Surfboards -Mini Malibu Surfboards -Retro Fish Surfboards -Womens Surfboards -Beginner Surfboards My question is could i weave these all together and write one long guide on say "Choosing The Type of Surboard you need" and cover all the board models in that article and then redirect the old pages to point to that one article. Would i still rank well for all these words Or would this destroy all my current rankings for these words? What is the best approach to rewriting and or combining old content pages that currently rank well but could be combined with others around the same theme to make it more user friendly?
Content Development | | isle_surf0 -
Duplicate content - 6 websites, 1 IP. Is the #1 site knocked down too?
Yes I know, running multiple websites on 1 IP isn't smart. 6 Websites with duplicate content on 1 IP is even worse. It's a technical issue we can't solve quickly. Thing is, our #1 website, which has the highest DA and PR, was the first website with all this content. All other websites we're running were launched a few months, and some a few years, later. All content was copied from the #1 website. I'd say the other websites would get knocked down by Google, because they duplicated the content. Google should see that our #1 website was the first that uploaded this content. Therefore our #1 website should rank normally. Questions is: What does Google think of duplicate content when all websites are on 1 IP? Is, or will our #1 website get punished as well?
Content Development | | Webprint0 -
Best way to resolve duplicate content issue?
Not sure about what to do about this - I have a client who has a ton of pages (around 1200) which are all City specific pages, for long-tail search. These are all written with paragraphs in the format such as: Order to [City] today. So every page has essentially the same content. The site also only has 1562 pages, so with 1200 of them being City-specific same-content pages, that can't be good. However the problem is that these pages still rank very well (usually Position 1 or 2) for the terms they're targeting, and bring in enough traffic and revenue to justify their purpose. We also have Country specific pages, and these are all with unique content, rather than the scripted content on the City pages. So for example, for Italy we might have: Italy Page (Unique Content) Rome (Duplicate Content) Milan (Duplicate Content) Venice (Duplicate Content) etc. (Duplicate Content) For a low traffic country (Austria), we tried to 301 the City pages to the Country page, but that only resulted in us seeing a drop in search results for the city keywords, from (usually) Position 1 to more like Page 3 or 4, so quite a drop. So, without writing 1200 pages worth of unique content, what would your advice be?
Content Development | | TME_Digital0