These days, technology evolves at lightning speed. This can present an interesting challenge for writers, especially when creating paid content for a client. Not only do you need to choose the perfect topic; you also have to know which details (technical and otherwise) your readers are really looking for, and optimize it all to rank in the country you’re targeting.
Below, we at 7awi Global will share our best tips on choosing blog post topics and creating strong articles for our tech clients, all using Semrush.
Step 1: Understand Your Audience
To choose the perfect article topic, you first need to understand the audience you’re targeting. To do this, we start by creating a custom audience persona, targeted toward the client’s goals.
Keep in mind that this process might vary, depending on the client’s unique needs, audience, location, and other factors.
Here are a few examples of what this might look like for clients with different needs:
- Technology companies looking to sell products: For this type of client, we would start with market research, focused on the age group most likely to be interested in those products, as well as being able to afford them. Most likely, that would include actively-employed adults between the ages of 18 and35.
- Technology companies looking to build brand awareness: These types of clients often want to show off their technical capabilities, meaning we might write content to attract tech geeks. Topics might include the technology infused into their products, studies and research they have published, and differentiating features in their products or services, as well as heavily describing the details aiming to attract tech geeks.
Step 2: Competitor Keyword Analysis
Next, we’ll analyze the content already being produced and read by our target audience, through a competitor analysis. This helps us to understand:
- How much traffic competitor pages are getting
- Which keywords they target
- Which articles are doing well
Seeing which pages perform the best can also help you better understand what your audience is looking for. And by studying which keywords your competitors target, you can identify keywords with high search volume and relatively low competition. All of this can help you to spark new topic ideas.
If you’re not sure who your competitors are, you can find out in Market Explorer, which is part of .Trends. Select “Find Competitors” and enter your client’s domain, and take note of which competitors appear in each Growth Quadrant (found in the Overview tab). Once you’ve identified your biggest sources of competition, then start researching them.
Here’s how it works: