How to qualify your content ideas and determine what could rank on Google
In this content series, we’ve covered how to generate new content ideas using audience discovery calls and data and search queries. Now it’s time to decide which ideas you want to move forward with.
Qualifying your content ideas is an important step, because most people have a finite amount of time and resources to spend on their content. You want to make sure you’re spending your valuable time and effort where it will actually make an impact.
This step is similar to the market research stage of a new product or service. Before you start work on a new idea, you want to check:
Whether there are lots of businesses doing exactly the same thing
If there are, whether there’s an opportunity for your business to do it better than them
We all know that ranking highly on Google and driving organic traffic to your site isn’t the only purpose of content marketing. However, ranking on search engines is something that most marketing managers want to achieve.
So, in this article, we’re going to specifically focus on qualifying your content ideas to determine which ones have a chance of ranking.
How to qualify content ideas for search engines
Once you’ve got a handful of content ideas that you know will resonate with your audience, the next step is to search Google for them individually.
Click into all the search results that come up on the first page and rate them against the following three points:
The quality of the content – does it answer that search query effectively?
When it was published – has it been kept up to date?
How reputable the source is – is Google likely to trust that site over yours?
Here’s how you find the answers to each of those questions.
1. The quality of the content
Most of the time, the quality of content is obvious in the first few seconds when you hit the site.
We’ve all bounced from articles that are too long, full of jargon or just don’t get to the point fast enough. It takes users about three seconds to decide whether to stay on a web page, so if you aren’t hooked immediately then there’s a good chance your customers won’t be either.
There’s also the flipside, where articles seem high quality at first but only provide a very top-level and basic overview of the topic.
It’s well worth spending time reading through the top articles before you discount your chances. If you reach the end of an article and think you could provide more detail and answer the query more effectively, there’s a real opportunity for you to seize that search term.
2. When the content was published
Most articles will have the date it was published at the top of the page.
If an article is more than two or three years old and hasn’t been updated since, there’s usually an opportunity to provide a fresher update. For topics like tax or compliance where regulations change often, anything older than a year is likely to be out of date.
The Pitch’s guide to government support for small businesses, first published in 2019, is a great example of the results you can get by choosing a popular topic and keeping content up to date.
We update the article at least once a year, removing expired support programmes and adding any new ones. To let users – and search engines – know that the post is up to date, we include a “Last updated on…” note at the top. As a result, it ranks on the first page of Google for almost a dozen “small business support” terms.
3. How reputable the website is
The more reputable a website is, the more likely it is to rank highly on Google.
You can measure a site’s reputability by looking at its domain authority. This is a metric from 0 to 100 that shows how likely a website is to rank on search engines.
Websites with a high domain authority have strong SEO health overall and a large number of high-quality external links pointing to their site. Sites like Apple, Google and Wikipedia have the highest domain authority online, because they’ve got millions of sites (many of which are reputable themselves) linking to them.
We recommend downloading the Moz toolbar to track domain authority. It’s free and will show you the ranking of each site on a search results page.
Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to quickly check how the current sites stack up against yours. While it’s not guaranteed that a site with a higher domain authority will rank over yours, bear in mind that superdomains like Wikipedia or gov.uk will be hard to beat for that search term.
Turning your research into content
This research should have provided insight into the competition for each search term and helped you qualify your new content ideas.
The low-hanging fruit will be terms that failed against each of the criteria – the existing content is low quality, out of date and from a site with a low domain authority. Providing you can create useful content and your site has good SEO health, it shouldn’t be too difficult for you to usurp existing articles.
At the other side of the spectrum, you’ll need to weigh up whether to work on ideas that are highly competitive (current content is high quality, up to date and from a reputable website). In these cases, it’s usually best to head back to the drawing board and see how you could make the ideas more niche to target a slightly different search term.
Don’t forget Google Trends
Finally, we wanted to include one last step that can be useful to qualify your content ideas – Google Trends.
Google Trends is free to use and will show you the interest in a search term over time, with 100 being the peak popularity for the term. It helps to forecast what people might be searching for in two or three months’ time, so you can see which content ideas to prioritise.
If you search for something and the interest is already very high, it’s likely the market is saturated and there’s probably not much demand for it. However, catching a term in the early stages – say, a value of 20 or 30 and rising – means there’s a good chance of your content serving a real need.
Looking to drive more organic traffic to your website? At Inkwell, we’re specialists in creating effective content strategies for businesses. Find out more about what we offer on our services page, or get in touch with us here.
