Finding blog ideas and syndication
-
We've had our blog for a little under 2 years now using Magento and we've only created 48 posts. As we're in the furniture industry topics are hard to come by and we've become stuck for ideas. Sure we have researched our audience, checked Q&A's and forums to analyse what questions our audience are asking, but the ideas are limited. It's a difficult industry to find niche articles that our audience would be interested in. Could anyone suggest any ideas on how we could find interesting topics that people would actually want to share and maybe our industry influencers would be interested in featuring on their sites, does syndication still work? Duplicate content is a big 'NO NO' for Google but as long as the third party site features a rel=canonical or link back to our original post, Google wouldn't have any problem with this?
-
OK, what is your goal for the different articles? i.e. social sharing, ranking for particular keywords, attracting links, or something else?
Once you know the goal of particular articles you can think about how to write them to achieve those goals (noting you may want to do all the goals suggested above, just focus on one goal per article).
So lets go through some suggested titles:
Social sharing: 10 Pieces of Furniture you couldn't do without. No. 7 will blow your mind!
Keyword ranking (more natural traffic) - How to clean red wine off your settee.
Links - More detailed articles that go in more depth than the other articles, often helpful but could involve ideas from the other articles so something like - "How to know you are paying the right price for your furniture"
Whatever you do when ranking for keywords, is check out the competition and make sure your article is better, so looks nice, contains better information, and is more helpful. For more ideas, just check out what your competition is writing about, and take some ideas and just make the articles 10 times better bringing in more \ different concepts and information so it is totally original.
-
I've never come across this site but there are some excellent topics here that we could utilise. It does hurt the neck a little through!! Much appreciated.
-
Thumbs up to Tom's suggestion. That reminds me that you can also run searches in Google on Yahoo Question's repository, so something like: furniture site:answers.yahoo.com or get more specific inserting wildcards like: *** furniture * site:answers.yahoo.com** Cheers!
-
What about looking for the questions that people are asking about your industry, products or niche?
Try http://answerthepublic.com/ - just enter the keyword you want and which Google to crawl and it will find a list of questions that people are actively searching for (appearing in similar searches/autocomplete).
Could open up a couple of content ideas.
-
I've done some marketing for the a few furniture sites (manufacturers and retailers) and the best kind of posts that work best (great engagement and lots of views) are lists like : 10 living room ideas, 15 kitchen designs for increased usability, 20 bedroom office designs for small spaces, etc. You don't need a lot of text for this, just images (which you can use with attribution rights). Check houzz.com for more details.
-
Hi Joshua. Sometimes it's all about finding something outside of the box when it comes to being able to create content on a regular basis. Tom Dickson probably didn't find his idea for Will it Blend? in the forums or common Q&As, still he tapped into a model that let him regularly demonstrate and solidify his brand. It also doesn't have to be solely tied to your site. If you have something that people enjoy your brand name often becomes part of the search. Just a few ideas: which couch does the dog prefer? Which couch does the cat prefer? Which lounge chair wore the throw pillow better? Etc. Cheers!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Find blog post idea
How do I find blog post ideas for my website blog when there are only very few questions people have. I am a tour operator operator and the the keywords I target are Provence bike tour, Normandy bike tour , Tuscany bike tour and so on. I am trying to to find blog ideas to create a topic cluster for those pillar pages. Any advice on how to find blog ideas that could boost my pillar pages. Thank you,
Content Development | | seoanalytics1 -
Which blog is best
We use Bigcommerce, at the moment we use wordpress for our blogs, bigcommerce has its own blog. Is it better to use the Bigcommerce blog or Wordpress.
Content Development | | CostumeD0 -
What's a good way to find recent blog posts about a given topic?
Let's say I want to find blog posts posted in the past week or so about "key west". These posts could be on a personal blog, travel blog, etc. Google News is mostly news sites (not blogs) and Google blog search doesn't work any more. What other good options are there? So far Open site Explorer Just Discovered is the best option I've found, but there is a lot of other stuff mixed in with a few blog posts.
Content Development | | AdamThompson1 -
Why is redirecting all broken pages to the homepage is a bad idea?
I have a site where all broken pages are redirected to the homepage. I've been told that it's a bad idea in terms of SEO. I just can't figure out why 🙂
Content Development | | VinceWicks0 -
I allow authority sites to republish my blog articles, which then outrank me
Hey everyone. This is my first question here, I apologize if it has been covered before. I have a health and nutrition blog [authority nutrition] that has been up since December 1st, 2012. I've managed to write quite a few viral articles which have given me a bunch of natural links and a domain authority of 49, which I think is pretty great for such a new site. Haven't done any link building and everything is 100% white hat. Getting good rankings and good traffic already, so I can't complain. My only (1st world) problem is that sometimes major authority sites (DA of 70-95) republish my content. I always say yes if they ask me first, but some of them just republish without even asking. My articles are always indexed on my blog before they get republished, but it doesn't seem to make a difference. These sites always clearly link to the original URL, but they often tend to outrank me for the keywords I was targeting in the articles. They tend to rank in the top 5, but my original article is nowhere to be found. I plan on continuing to allow these sites to republish as I get powerful links and good traffic from them, but it's a bit frustrating that I don't seem to get the credit as the original source. I've already set up Google Authorship, but it doesn't seem to help. Is there anything I can do to make sure Google recognizes my article as the original and chooses to rank my site instead of the authority site that simply republished my article?
Content Development | | kriistjanm1 -
My New blog has NO content since 2 months, the day it was launch, What to DO? Is it "DEAD"???
2 months ago, I publish a NEW blog, http://www.mervrating.org The blog has only 3 posts. I don't have much time to work on it. Does it HURT my SEO? Can I start working on it on regular basis and try to built authority or does it looks "dead" to search engine? I would like to bring it alive and give it a second chance, will it be hard if it has no content since the beginning? What is your opinions? Thank you, BigBlaze
Content Development | | BigBlaze2050 -
Help on blog topics for my niche
I'm looking for a couple of blogging ideas to get the ball rolling (mainly in my head) for one of the company websites I am working on. The site is https://perco.co.uk The company is based around offering trenchless technology across the UK. The first couple of posts are more like 'Latest news' items and I have only really come up with an idea of 'microtunnelling vs directional drilling'. I didn't seem to get much out of ubersuggest, soovle and google instant. Has anyone got any ideas? Thanks
Content Development | | Hughescov
Shaun0 -
Duplicate Text on Blog & Internal News Page
I have two places I post news for our company. Our blog - typically more informal posts
Content Development | | seo-hunter
mycompany.wordpress.com & Our news page - typically more newsworthy than the blog
mycompany.com/news My question is, It is okay to just copy the exact text from my wordpress blog and paste to my news area of my site and vice versa? Does this hurt ranking potential for either page?0