Topic research is key and should form a core part of your entire content marketing strategy. Most marketers focus squarely on keyword research. However, when people search for keywords, they aren’t looking for keywords per se, their intent is to find quality, actionable content on that topic. You can learn about the features and functionalities of ahrefs and other marketing and research applications, on this website: webpatogh.com
This brings us back to the importance of topic research in developing relevant blog post ideas or topics to drive organic traffic and build engagement with your followers and customers. Ahrefs is one of the popular tools for keyword research, competitive analysis, backlink research, content research, rank tracking, and web monitoring.
Starting at $99 per month, it is rather expensive for marketers on a lean budget. However, what it lacks in affordability, it makes up for in functionality.
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Other Interesting Topic Research Tools
There are several other great tools for conducting topic and keyword research that can help fill your content calendar with top quality content your readers will love.
Some of these include:
- Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator
- BuzzSumo
- UberSuggest
- AllTop
- Google Trends
- Answer the Public
- Google Keyword Tool
- FeedlyReader
- Scoop.It
- SEMRush, etc
In this post, we’ll learn how to do topic research in ten (10) simple steps using Ahrefs. This will be handy in case you decide to use it in the future.
How to Conduct Topic Research with Ahrefs
Step 1: Create an Account
Ahrefs allows new users to create a free account with 7 days free trial to test-drive the platform. Sign up or sign in to your account to see what you can do including alerts, site explorer, content explorer, keywords explorer, rank tracker, site audit.
There’s a whole lot more that you can do with Ahrefs as mentioned above, ranging from competitor analysis to web monitoring and managing your mentions.
For topic research, click on the keywords explorer tab as seen below:
This will take you to the keywords explorer page where you can get thousands of relevant keyword ideas, among others.
If we type in “blog post ideas” and click on the search icon, it will display results for the search query with other interesting metrics such as
Our search result tells us that “blog post ideas” has a difficulty score of 47 which is hard because we would need up to 74 quality backlinks from other websites to rank in the top 10 for this particular keyword.
It also shows us the global volume for “blog ideas” keyword, indicating regions with the highest search in descending order.
Similarly, it displays the search volume for the parent topic.
Furthermore, Ahrefs Keywords Research displays other keyword ideas by search volume in descending order.
At this stage, you can start gaining a clearer picture of what specific long-tail keywords to target for your campaigns.
In addition, it will display even more keyword ideas in the form of questions.
These prompts can get your creative juices flowing and help you generate some blog topic ideas from which you can start creating content for your blog or for guest posting purposes.
As we can see, the keyword difficulty and competition for this set of keywords is lower than our main entry. These are less difficult to rank for, presenting a great opportunity for marketers to optimize their SEO strategy.
Another interesting side to Ahrefs Keyword Explorer is the newly discovered keywords section. It displays newly discovered keywords that are similar to your original entry.
These are keywords with search volume of 10 or less. With the right approach, hard work, consistency and quality content, you can easily rank for such keywords.
Note, that with such low search volume, it means that not many people are using such search terms, but search behavior being what it is can change. A major trend, world event or industry shift can suddenly increase search around particular keywords and this will favor first-movers.
Conclusion
By narrowing down as we have done using a process of elimination and subtraction/addition, you can come up with brilliant topic ideas for your blog, using Ahrefs. Given time, patience and consistency, blogging can have a positive multiplier effect on your business revenue and entire bottom line.
Learn more about the tools and technologies being used in digital marketing and search engine optimization, on this website: www.metatix.com
