Choosing A Blog Topic

We’ve all been there - sitting in front of a piece of paper, pen in hand, ready to write, and nothing to write. Or, maybe in the digital age, you’re sitting in front of the computer with hands placed properly on the keyboard. And then, nothing except writer’s block.

And then, when something comes, we wonder “Is it good enough? Will anyone even read it?”

I don’t claim to have the answer, but I’ll tell you how I came up with the topic for my most recent post on my other blog Puppy Snuggles.

Prerequisite

In order to do what I did, you’ll first need to make sure you have a Google Webmaster account, and have had it long enough with some content so Google can analyze your site. It takes Google a week or so for this to happen.

Finding Ideas

Once logged in, go to Search Analytics. There are a couple ways to go there, but the most consistent is to select “Search Analytics” underneath “Search Traffic” in the sidebar:

Here, you can select how many parameters you want to view (clicks, impressions, click through rate, and position). I suggest selecting them all to get the most data, however, it’s not guaranteed you’ll get any more results if you do. I got 14 results no matter how many I selected. You definitely want the queries radio box selected, since that will hold the values we care about:

Here are my 14 results:

These “14 results” are “14 ideas to blog about.” Of course, a few of them really are duplicates (“what causes a dog to limp” and “what causes dogs to limp”). Another - “poodle mix puppies” - has to do with a recent blog post.

I decided to do a blog post dog vitamin and minerals. The world of SEO (search engine optimization) is all about long-tail keywords (which are more like key phrases) so I was sure to use each related phrase in my post at least once but preferably more than once.

Writing the Post

I used to write my posts in the edit box on GitHub itself, but I found I was more prone to typos and other errors than I thought. For a few posts I used Microsoft Word, but now I type it out in Grammarly. I don’t use Grammarly Premium, and I’m not interested in trying it mostly because I have no idea what it offers.

After I type it in Grammarly, I copy-paste it over to GitHub and publish it. Now, it’s time to promote my post, but that’s a blog post for another day.