5 strategies to choose SEO blog topics you can rank for
No doubt, if you want to rank in Google in 2025, you need to create high-quality content. But the reality search engine optimization today is that you can still create absolutely incredible content and never rank on page 1! In order to avoid this unfortunate scenario, you have to start by selecting SEO blog topics that you can actually rank for.
What makes for a successful blog post idea?
In today's day and age, an unprecedented amount of content is published every single day, making keyword research an absolutely vital part of your content creation workflow. The sites that find themselves at the top of the rankings are the ones who generate their blog post ideas based upon a thorough research process that identifies realistic, relevant keywords.
Once they have decided what specific search queries they are aiming to rank for, they can focus on creating and optimizing content for their target audience. So, how do we decide what search queries are worth pursuing?
Today, we'll go over five keywords research strategies you can use to turn general blog post ideas into data-informed, well researched SEO blog topics that will drive organic traffic. Let's dive in!
5 Strategies to select the best SEO blog topics
- Base your blog post ideas around long-tail keywords
- Look into commercial queries with low SEO difficulty
- Learn what works for competitors
- Explore technical, complex topics
- Create a new product category
1. Base your blog post ideas around long-tail keywords
What is a long-tail keyword?
As defined by Wordstream, long-tail keywords are "longer and more specific keyword phrases that visitors are more likely to use when they're closer to a point-of-purchase or when they're using voice search." These keywords might not carry massive traffic, but they are way more targeted.
What is a short keyword?
In contrast, short keywords usually carry high search volume, but fierce competition. For example, let's dive into a keyword research tool, Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer and look at one of the most popular topics in our content strategy here at Frase: search engine optimization. "SEO" is an extremely competitive query with a 99/100 difficulty score, and is filled with ads. With that information in mind, this is definitely not a keyword we'd add to our content marketing strategy.
Pro tip: You can also use Keyword Everywhere's Chrome Extension to get quick stats as you search in Google.
How to identify long-tail keywords
To create your SEO content strategy, you need to find more focused, long-tail keywords where you can compete and win. Let's say we're interested in queries such as "how to optimize your content for seo". As you can see below, this long-tail query has way less competition, but still plenty of relevant traffic.
Ideas from forums
Analyze what users are asking in forums and communities. This can help you come up with real-life questions your audience might have. Places like Quora or Reddit are great sources of inspiration for long-tail queries. Questions also have a higher chance of capturing aFeatured Snippet in Google.
Keyword research tools
You can also leverage SEO tools like Ahrefs (shown above), Google Keyword Planner(free) and Kwfinder(starts at $25/mo). Whichever is your preference, your ultimate goal is to find long-tail keywords that have low competition and decent traffic (at least 50-100 searches per month).
If you want to dig deeper into "keyword difficulty", these are 2 good resources: The Big, Vital, All-in-One Guide to Keyword Difficulty and What is the Keyword SEO Difficulty?
You can also check out Frase's ultimate guide to SEO keyword strategy here.
Content pro-tip
When turning these long-tail keywords into SEO blog posts, consider formatting them as step-by-step guides. Long-tail keywords really lend themselves to this type of content as many of them start with "how to". As an added bonus, presenting yourself and your brand as a helpful expert who provides actionable advice positively impacts the user experience on your blog and boosts your brand authority.
A few examples of blog post topics that fit the bill:
- A lifestyle blog, could post a "How to create a morning routine" post
- A business blog could create a "How to master pivot tables in Excel" post
- A beauty blog could do something like, "How to master a smokey eye makeup look." Frase even has a useful How-to article generator— you can get started with it here!
2. Look into commercial queries with low SEO difficulty
Queries with high CPC (cost per click) usually represent keywords that are driving business to somebody. In other words, companies are betting high on those keywords because they are converting into customers.
If you dig deep into high CPC queries, you might be able to find search terms with both high CPC and low SEO difficulty. This means you can potentially rank for queries other companies are paying a premium in ads.
To accomplish this, you can use a combination of Google Keyword Planner (to make a list of high CPC keywords) and Kwfinder (to identify low difficulty keywords based on backlinks and domain authority).
3. Learn what works for your competitors
You want to know what queries your competitors are ranking for, both organically and through PPC. Ahrefs is one of the most accurate tools to give you this information. Just enter a competitor domain into their Site Explorer tool and Ahrefs will tell you how their website is generating traffic. Magical.
Sometimes you want to go deeper than that. While knowing what queries are working for your competitors is crucial, you might want to take a deeper dive into all the topics your competitor is mentioning site-wide. To this end, you need a toolkit that can perform 2 operations:
- Crawler: extract all the URLs from a website. The most popular crawler in the SEO world is probably ScreamingFrog.
- Topic analysis: analyze titles and clean text from each URL and automatically extract topics. This requires an intelligent tool with advanced NLP capabilities. Frase can help you accomplish this task.
Once you've identified topics that are working for your competitors, you can add these into your content marketing strategy to create SEO-friendly blog posts.
4. Explore technical, complex topics
Many complex terms are initially only used in academia until they become more mainstream topics. In other words, most people outside academia will know nothing about them. This presents an SEO opportunity because at some point someone will communicate those complex technical topics to a wider audience without the jargon. In general, these topics will initially carry low traffic but high growth and low competition.
The search results for academic-oriented topics frequently show results in PDF format, and are usually pay-walled. These two characteristics can be potentially detrimental for SEO purposes as PDF is not the preferred format by search engines. Bounce rates might be higher for paywalled websites. Again, this screams SEO opportunity.
5. Create a new product category
Some of the most valuable companies were able to create a new product category. When this happens a new term is created, and therefore, a new potential search query. For example, Drift created the term "conversational marketing".
When they first started out, this novelty gave Drift an unfair advantage over all the SEO terms related to conversational marketing. At the time, they were probably the only company in the world that was using the term, so Google saw them as the absolute authority.
In the first few years, if you looked at page 1 after searching "conversational marketing" on Google, Drift took 4 out of 10 results, including the featured snippet. This query undoubtedly brought Drift thousands of qualified leads per month. Sounds like an incredibly effective marketing strategy, right?
Coming up with a unique way to define what you do can be strategic for SEO purposes. You will monopolize the early growth of that term in search engines, and reap the benefits in the long run.
Wrapping it up
With these strategies in mind, your practically a one-person blog ideas generator, ready to identify relevant topics for your blog posts that are sure to help you crush your organic traffic goals! Remember to check back with the Frase blog for all things SEO trends, industry news, step-by-step guides and more.
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