Blogging is an effective and popular form of content marketing. It’s accessible to almost everyone, so it’s a cost-effective way to market your business.

However, you can’t just write whatever and expect to reap the benefits with little to no effort. Your blog needs to be high-quality so that search engines will rank it high in the SERPs. Regardless of how many blog posts you publish, they won’t get as much traffic if they’re not valuable.

That said, let’s talk about how to conduct research for your blog, so you come out with thoughtful, valuable, and optimized content each time.

Why Do You Need A Research Strategy?

While most SEO practitioners would advise “quality over quantity,” you still need to be consistent with your content. Essentially, you don’t have to post three articles a day, but that doesn’t mean you can leave your blog un-updated for months without consequences.

The phrase “quantity over quality” is true. After all, coming out with a great and well-optimized post every other day is better than publishing three low-quality posts in a day. However, you might be able to post more if you manage to streamline your research process.

Remember, you want to speed up your process (even just a little bit) but still maintain its quality.

The truth is, you don’t have to hold off on posting content. It just needs to be high-quality. So if you’re business is capable of consistently coming out with a lot of high-quality content, then all the better for your content marketing strategy.

5 Tips On Researching Your Blog Posts

For a more efficient research process, you need to plan, research, and organize your thoughts and arguments before you start writing the actual text of the blog post.

Here’ how:

1. Start With Keyword Research

Before anything else, make sure you’ve chosen your keywords first. This way, you get to write well-optimized content around high-volume keywords instead of forcing awkward keywords into irrelevant content.

After writing a great blog post, the last thing you want to do is to sift through possible keywords until you find one that fits your content.

Remember, keywords have an underlying search intent. Therefore, people expect specific types of content depending on the keywords they type into the search bar. So if your keywords are a mere afterthought, you might end up optimizing for keywords that are irrelevant to what you’ve just written.

2. Gather Your Sources

Back up your content with facts. Even if you’re an expert in your niche, fact-checking is still a good practice. Plus, the fresher the topic is in your mind, the easier it will be to write down your thoughts.

Gathering your sources and reading them through eliminates mistakes and saves you some time. You don’t want to fact-check after you’ve written more than a thousand words.

While you should always proofread anything before it’s published, avoiding wrong assumptions and false claims early on will reduce the mistakes you need to go back for.

3. Stake Out Your Competition

SEO is very competitive. After all, it’s all about ranking higher than everyone else in the SERPs. Therefore, the better you research, write, and optimize, the higher your blog posts will rank.

That said, staking out your competition is vital for two reasons:

1. Observing your top-ranking competitors gives you an idea of what search engines consider the most relevant, helpful, and valuable content.
2. Researching your competition helps you find content gaps.

As mentioned, ranking first is the goal here. The ones Google considers the best content are the ones that rank first in the SERPs, meaning they’re the most relevant to the keywords, the site is the most reputable, and most site visitors enjoy the content itself. Look at the top-ranking blog posts, look at how they’re written and optimized, and see what you can apply to your own blog.

Another important thing you should be doing is to find content gaps. Look for topics, angles, and keywords that your competitors haven’t covered in their content, and consider discussing them in yours.

Since SEO is very competitive, originality can get you a boost. So consider tackling perspectives that have not yet been discussed.

4. Write An Outline

Once you’ve gathered all the necessary data, organize them in an outline. Doing so helps you layout your data systematically.

Outlining guides the flow of your writing. This helps you see the logical progression of your thoughts and arguments, so you don’t have to go back and delete, move, and change large chunks of text later.

Here are some other tips to help you create an efficient outline:

• Use Concise Phrases. Don’t get too worked up about writing the perfect sentence. Your outline is just a placeholder for your thoughts, so prioritize organization when you build one.
• Lay Out Keywords. Lay out specific keywords you want to optimize for. Some writers get carried away while putting their thoughts into typewritten words and often forget to incorporate relevant keywords.
• Link Your Sources. Add links to your sources and citations in the outline. To make it easier, don’t list your sources down at the end. Instead, link them to specific sections, so you know which argument, paragraph, or list entry references them.

Outlines are also really helpful when you’re aiming for longer and more in-depth content. This makes sure you include all the details that need to be discussed and helps you spot extraneous or unnecessary topics.

5. Plan Future Topics

The best way to streamline your research strategy is to plan ahead.

Remember, brainstorming can take a lot of time. If you don’t have a solid idea in mind, you won’t know what keywords, resources, and competitor content to look for. So lay out a list of content ideas and write them all down. The more you have, the better.

Here are some other helpful tips to improve your content planning:

• Plan Cornerstone Content. If you’re just starting out, plan your content alongside your site structure. Write your cornerstone content first (i.e., the most information about your product, niche, and company goals). Once you’ve covered all the important topics, you can start planning for other types of content.
• Link Possible Citations. If you ever read an interesting blog, article, or news story you want to write about, link them alongside your ideas. Doing this will save you from having to dig up references when you need them in the future.

Bottom-line

Brainstorming, research, and preparations take up a huge chunk of the writing process. Sometimes, coming up with a great idea and fleshing them out takes longer than the writing itself.

Creating an efficient research process will not only help you write better, but it’ll also speed things up. The less time wasted on confusion and disorganized strategies, the faster you can come out with new content.

Author’s Bio

JC Serrano is the founder of 1000Attorneys.com, one of the very few private enterprises certified to process lawyer referrals by the California State Bar. His marketing strategies have continuously evolved since 2005, incorporating ever-changing SEO strategies into lawyerleadmachine.com.