Intro
In the last episode of our SEO Reality Show, we shared how an agency grew a local artisan bakery’s SEO traffic by 214% in just 4 months. Although optimizations are still in the process of being implemented, the agency and Edelweiss have moved forward in their collaboration to start the bakery’s blog.
If you’re wondering if your business really needs a blog, or you’re unsure how to get started, keep reading. We’ll show you how our partner agency found engaging, potentially high-converting topics for Edelweiss bakery to help them attract more of their target audience.
How Blogs Can Help Businesses
Content marketing — which typically centers around blog posts — can play an essential role in helping you to attract and convert more customers. This is true for several reasons:
- It can help you get more backlinks to your site, as third-party sites rarely place links to commercial pages but are more likely to link to valuable content. High-quality content can help solve their reader’s problems.
- Strong content can increase positive performance ranking factors that Google may use to influence the SERP results. This includes the amount of time spent on a page by a user and the number of pages viewed during a session. User behavior is an important factor to consider when it comes to SEO.
- You can rank for more keywords in your niche. The more relevant semantic keywords you’re ranking for, the better the chance you have to capture users in your target audience.
The Process
Edelweiss’s site didn’t have a blog when they started working with the agency, but the agency recommended having one to increase organic traffic. The agency and Edelweiss then worked together to determine what types of content the bakery’s blog should create.
Read on to learn what steps the agency took to help Edelweiss find relevant, high-value topics for their blog.
Challenge: find blog topics which have both relevance for the client and high SEO potential.
Step 1 — Analysis of Competitors’ Traffic
The first step that the agency took to help Edelweiss find compelling topics for their blog was to look at what their competitors’ were writing about and the traffic their blog posts received.
Competitor research is often a good place to start, because you can gain insights into what’s already working well with similar audiences. You can find some ideas to adapt to your own blog and look for new opportunities that could help you stand out.
As a starting point, the bakery provided a list of several competitors, and the agency identified a few more using Semrush’s Organic Research tool.