Here at Rhino, marketing is all we do. We not only handle marketing for our various clients, we also discuss it, read about it and think about it constantly. You might say we’re a little obsessed!
One thing we see a lot of businesses struggle with is their blog. A blog is a crucial part of an effective inbound marketing strategy. Your blog is what’s going to allow your business to be discovered by internet searchers. By using blogs that feature keywords that are prominent in your market, you’ll end up ranking highly in Google search results. And studies have shown, the higher you are on a results page, the greater your web traffic will be.
But the concept of blogging isn’t what businesses usually struggle with: it’s the execution. They don’t know how long a blog should be, who they should tailor it to, etc. But their number one issue always seems to be “What do I write about?”
There’s an old writing maxim that says you should “write what you know.” And that’s absolutely true: write about subjects your business has expertise in, subjects you or your employees/boss/owner are knowledgeable in. But another way to discover good blog subjects is to consider your consumers’ pain points.
Understanding a pain point
So what do I mean when I say “pain point?” Basically, a problem a consumer encounters that your business can solve. No matter what your business does, or what product/service you provide, you solve a problem(s) for consumers. For example, if you run a pest control company, what kind of problems do you solve? Cockroach infestations, commercial pest management and hornet/wasp nest removals, to name a few.
You can use pain points to come up with blog articles in two ways: 1. You can write blogs that directly discuss a problem(s) and 2. You can use these pain points to come up with keywords for future blog articles.
- Blogs that directly address the problem
So if we return to our pest control example, here are some blog articles you can write: “How to safely deal with a hornets nest,” “Help! I have a mouse problem” “How do I manage pest control issues in my business?”
These blog articles are relevant to the target consumer and they address pain points. That’s important, because internet searchers will look for answers to their problems by Googling them. By using these pain points to create your blogs, when a consumer Googles “How to remove hornets nest,” ideally your blog article will be one of the first results.
- Pain points to discover keywords
These leads us into point No. 2: Using pain points to come up with keywords. Keywords are another extremely important part of inbound marketing, because they also help your site’s Google search ranking. You want to discover the keywords that are used most frequently when searching for your products/services, and pain points can help you do that.
Consider all of the pain points in your business; going back to our pest control example, most of the pain points have to do with removal and control of specific pests. Therefore, we start to discover certain words that appear often: the names of the pests (termites, ants, cockroaches, mice), and action words (damage, removal, control, extermination). These are going to be the keywords you want to emphasize, because you know people will be searching for them often.
Once you discover these keywords, you can then incorporate them into your blogs. Every blog should have at least one or two keywords in the headline, and the blog subject should be centered on one or more keywords. Using our pest control keywords, we could come up with a blog centered on termite damage and title it something along the lines of “How do I know if I have termite damage?”
This is a simple look at coming up with blog topics for your business, to get a much more detailed look, check out our free eBook:
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