by Benny | Dec 13, 2023
There are many wonderful writers who think that they can be successful in the blog writing business. However, it takes more than excellent writing skills in order to start an effective blog. Key to your success is making sure that the blog is actually being read.
Google Trends is a tool that you can use to ensure that you are maximizing viewership on your blog. It has many features that can help in this area. Read on to learn all about how Google Trends can help you manage your blog!
Do I Have to Use Google Trends for My Blog?
Since Google Trends can be a very useful tool in helping your blog succeed, it is a good idea to learn about how to use it in the best way possible.
Google Trends can give you more than the more primitive keyword research tools. It actually gives you context behind the popular search queries that you’re trying to learn about. This can be really useful for a blog owner, as it can give you a lot of insight that helps you write content that is actually going to draw in readers.
This tool can help you figure out not only which queries are the most popular, but why people are searching for this information. This can help you publish content at the times when it is most likely to be read.
You don’t necessarily have to use Google Trends for your blog, but it is certainly a useful tool for anyone who wants to make high ranking content. If a successful, lucrative blog is your goal, you really should consider using Google Trends.
Should I Use Google Trends for Every Article?
Google Trends is one among many tools that can help you make every article as successful as possible. It can tell you which keywords are most likely to be successful at the point in time when you are publishing that article. Different keywords may be trending at this point than at the point when you started the blog.
It’s a good idea to look at Google Trends periodically while creating, maintaining, and adding content to your blog. The following are good times to look at Google Trends:
Using Google Trends Helps Bloggers Avoid Fad Niches
There are many fad niches that may deceive you into thinking a keyword or topic would be good for your blog. However, if it is truly a fad niche, it will be a waste of your time and energy. The fad will disappear very quickly, and the content will no longer add value to your site.
This can be particularly disappointing if the topic of your entire blog was based on a fad niche.
You can circumvent this problem with Google Trends. What you should do when logging on to the site is set the time range to a minimum of 12 months. In some cases, you might want to set it at an even longer range.
This will minimize the chance that you are investing into a trend that will soon disappear. If the site is set to 12 months, you will be able to see which trends have been growing consistently for at least 12 months.
Of course, you may already know exactly what you want to blog about, regardless of trends. If this is the case, you should not blog about another topic in which you have no interest simply to keep up with the trends.
However, you can use Google Trends here as well. You can use it just to see which keywords have been relevant for some time. You can tailor your content ideas to this and achieve higher viewership this way.
Google Trends Can Help You Find Growing Niches
Google Trends can help you not only avoid fad niches, but also give you a pretty strong prediction as to whether a niche will continue to grow in the future. Of course, there are no guarantees, but it can give you a pretty reliable indicator as to whether your niche of interest is going to continue to grow over the coming months and years.
If you find a niche that Google Trends tells you is likely to grow, that can give you confidence that this may be a good topic on which you can blog.
The “Breakout Ideas” Feature Can Give You Keyword and Topic Ideas
In the “Related Topics” and “Related Queries” sections of Google Trends, there are Breakout topics. These are currently trending topics that could be very profitable for you to write about. They received the breakout label when the topic has gotten a 5000% increase within your specified time period.
There are a few things to know about Breakout topics. They are as follows:
- There is always a chance that these trends will shift in the other direction fairly soon, but you should look at these topics in order to see the trends over time.
- Google shows you the percentage of search volume increases for any keyword search.
- If any search term is growing more than 5,000%, it will simply be marked as “Breakout.”
- Sometimes, breakout keywords can be helpful in that they are not yet competitive and can give you the chance to establish a foothold before they become competitive.
The trending keywords among Breakout topics can help you figure out how to parcel out your content if you already have the niche for your blog.
You should keep in mind that some of these breakout keywords are actually fads and will probably not be popular anymore after a few months, but they can help you gain viewership for at least some time if you time them correctly.
If you are going to use breakout ideas, make sure to do it quickly. They are popular right now, and you want to capitalize upon this if you can before the trend starts to wane. You should not center your entire blog around a breakout keyword, because it could end up being a fad.
However, it could be a very good idea to use breakout keywords to time the release of your content appropriately.
Google Trends Can Help Bloggers Best Utilize Seasonal Trends
Google Trends can help you take advantage of seasonal trends. Obviously, there are certain topics that are going to be more utilized at certain times of the year. For example, if you are writing a blog about dogs, you are more likely to achieve higher viewership with an article on Christmas gifts for your dog close to that holiday than you are in the middle of the year.
You can verify these seasonal topics using Google Trends. This site can show you what times of the year this topic is likely to peak, and you can make sure to time your content release just before this peak. You don’t want to publish it in the middle of the peak because you will lose out on the views you would have gotten during the first part of the peak.
You also do not want to publish it after the peak is over because you will have lost out on the benefit the peak could have brought you.
Google Trends Can Introduce You to Profitable Product Categories
In addition to content, many bloggers make money via affiliate and e-commerce marketing. Essentially, you are paid to sell a product. If someone who is reading your blog clicks on one of the products you are advertising and actually purchases it, you will get a small commission as a result.
Whatever you’re chosen niche, you can go to the “Related Topics” and “Related Queries” sections of Google Trends and find product ideas that will make you some money.
Google Trends Assists in Keyword Research
Google Trends is not to be used exclusively for keyword research. There are actually many other tools that are more efficient than Google Trends in this particular area.
However, you should use it to an extent. It can assist you in identifying high demand long tail keywords. It can also give you many related queries when you input a keyword. This allows you to fairly easily increase your base keyword pool.
An even more powerful strategy would be to use Google Trends along with another platform. This way, you can see metrics such as keyword difficulty and traffic.
Google Trends Can Help You Maximize the Views from Your Region
You can actually set Google Trends in order to analyze the data for your country. You can do this right away, selecting your country from the drop down menu in the corner. The region to which you said it can actually have a pretty major effect on the search interest of any given topic. This helps you target a local audience if this is something you would like to do.
There are many uses for the “Interest by subregion” feature on Google Trends. These are as follows:
- It allows you what keywords are trending and different subregions, as well as cities and states.
- Search volume for different keywords can vary quite a bit even between states in the same country.
- It is a great tool for anyone who is trying to gain local interest for their page.
- It can help you gain viewership in other parts of the world by altering your keyword in a certain way, while not compromising on your content quality.
Google Trends Can Uncover New Keyword Ideas
Google Trends can also help you find new keywords without having to search for a specific one. Go to the “Trending Searches” feature to see which keywords are currently rising. Specifically, it will show you real-time data for searches that have really gone up in the last 24 hours.
However, you definitely should use your judgment with this feature. Most of the time, these keywords represent very short-term fads. Many of them are not even worth creating one blog post around.
Keep in mind, though, that some of them can have lasting power. If you can find these keywords, you can really drive up viewership on your blog. The keyword is brand new in many cases, so it is a term that you will not usually be able to find using traditional keyword tools. If you are one of the first ones to use it, this can really help your viewership.
The LSI Keywords Feature Can Help You with SEO
If you use the feature on Google Trends that shows you LSI keywords, you can improve your own on-page SEO. If you have already written the post, you can use the “Related Topics” and “Related Queries” sections in order to find terms that are closely tied to the keyword, according to Google.
At this point, you would just need to add these terms into your content where you are able to do so.
Google Trends Can Be Useful for Social Media and Webinars
In some cases, you might have a blog that is connected to a social media account. You can use the above strategies to figure out the best time to create a social media campaign on your topic. If you want to host a webinar, you want to make sure you are reaching the right people at the optimal time. Google Trends can help you with this as well.
Conclusion
As you can see, Google Trends can be very helpful when it comes to picking out a niche for your blog and releasing content at the optimal time. It has various features that can tell you what keywords are trending, in what parts of the world you’re likely to draw the most interest, and how you can improve your on-page SEO.
You may be a fantastic writer, but your blog is unlikely to be successful unless you focus on the marketing side as well. You need to make sure that you are doing everything you can to draw in viewership, so that you are able to monetize your blog. Google Trends can help you do just that.
by Benny | Dec 8, 2023
With more than 600 million blogs on the internet and about 7 million blog posts being published each day, getting your blog noticed is becoming more difficult by the minute. Currently, building topical authority and domain authority are two of the most effective SEO strategies for bloggers, but it is often asked: do these go hand in hand?
Topical authority is reached when one establishes oneself as an expert on a specific topic, whereas domain authority is reached when one’s website ranks highly in competitive searches. Topical and domain authority are closely related; however, there are some who deny that domain authority has any influence on website rankings.
Want to find out how these strategies work together to draw traffic to your website? (And learn even more strategies to get your content noticed!) Keep reading.
The Close Relationship Between Topical and Domain Authority
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an evolving set of guidelines and tools meant to drive more traffic to a website. There have been many “hot” SEO practices over the years (remember keyword stuffing?), but not all of them have stood the test of time.
By definition, topical authority and domain authority seem fundamentally different. However, the moving parts of both authorities work separately and together to bring more traffic to your website.
While building your domain authority, you will also build your topical authority. The same links you are using to ensure that your website ranks higher in searches are also helping to show that you have done the work and the research to be considered an expert in your niche.
Topical Authority Cements You as the Expert
Topical authority is the new – and improved – “keyword stuffing.” It takes the bare-bones strategy of the years-old technique and multiplies it tenfold, using clever techniques to “stuff” a website full of valuable, authoritative information. But how can you establish topical authority?
Establishing Topical Authority
At first glance, it may seem like establishing topical authority is easy, but it can be very hard work. It’s much more than writing a collection of articles on a single topic.
Here are some of the ways that you can secure topical authority:
- Be strategic with your content. It’s vital to have a plan for producing content that establishes you as a trustworthy and reliable content creator.
- Fully understand user intent. Cater your articles to your readers’ intentions behind their keyword searches.
- Create topic clusters. Find a broad topic and focus on creating multiple articles that can link back and forth to one another to ensure your blog covers all the information on that topic.
- Be intentional with your links. Ensure that your backlinks, hyperlinks, etc. are from reputable sources so that your domain rating backs up your topical authority.
- Create topic clusters. Take a single broad topic and branch out into more focused areas of that topic in smaller articles. These families of articles will provide plenty of internal links for your site.
As you can see, topical authority is more than just writing multiple articles on one main topic. You can easily use the strategies above to raise your topical authority quickly.
Semantic SEO and How it Helps Topical Authority
You won’t get far when raising your site’s topical authority if you aren’t a bit purposeful with your words. Semantic SEO is a strategy that focuses on using language to its benefit to raise topical authority. But what exactly does this mean?
Typically, when you type one search query, others will follow. Semantic SEO aims to prevent that. This strategy dictates that the content creator aims to answer as many questions about the query as possible to keep the reader on their website for longer. The more answers the user can find on your website, the better.
Here are some ways that you can use Semantic SEO to your advantage:
| Semantic SEO Strategy |
Explanation |
| Focus on topic depth and content length. |
Longer content is preferred because it can give more information, and make sure to cover all your content extensively. |
| Utilize keyword clusters. |
Find multiple keywords and phrases semantically related to one another to use in your content. |
| Check out “People Also Ask” under your Google search. |
Look through this section of related queries, and use them to figure out what users are really looking for regarding your topic. |
| Use “cheat codes.” |
Content optimizer tools can be used to find a variety of semantically related words and phrases for you to use to improve your topical depth. |
These are only a few of the many targeted actions you can take to increase the topical authority of your website.
Domain Authority Ensures a High-Ranking Website
Simply put, domain authority (or domain rating) is a score between 1 and 100 that is issued to a website depending on the strength of that site’s SEO. Determining what a good domain authority is for your niche is a bit more difficult because different niches have different average domain ratings.
Generally, having a domain authority of 50 is considered “competitive regardless of the niche or industry.” Some niches and industries consistently keep lower domain ratings, but other websites’ keywords are so prevalent that their ratings shoot up incredibly fast!
Establishing Domain Authority
Domain authority may seem a bit trickier to obtain than topical authority, but it’s pretty straightforward because you follow SEO strategies to boost your rankings.
Instead of focusing on the topic, you steer your focus toward building a surplus of links and sources within your content that show you have done your research and found a wealth of information for your readers. Ensure that they do not need to do another search to find the answers they need.
One thing you must remember is domain authority is finicky. The score you need is determined by your niche, so make sure to only compare your score to other websites within your niche.
Checking Your Domain Rating
Checking the domain authority of your website is easier than ever! There are multiple sites that you can use to find your rating.
Here are a few websites that can help you find your domain authority with short explanations of how they rank your website:
| Website |
Rating Details |
| MOZ |
This site gives a “domain authority” or “DA” score. Your site’s total number of links and number of linking root domains are only two of the dozens of factors MOZ uses to find its rating. |
| Ahrefs |
This site gives two ratings. Its “Ahrefs rank” considers both the size and quality of your backlinks. Its “domain rating” ranks a site’s complete backlink profile against other similar sites. |
| Majestic |
This site actually rates topical and domain authority. Its “flow metric scores” consider both the total number of website links and the content quality of the site. |
| Semrush |
This site offers an “authority score” that considers an entire domain’s quality and SEO performance. |
The websites above figure your domain rating using several factors, but the number of reputable and authoritative links within your website remains the most important factor when figuring this rating.
Is One Authority More Important than the Other?
It’s already been established that both topical and domain authority work together to boost your website’s traffic, but is one more important than the other?
The best way to build topical authority is to build domain authority. Because of this, neither is more important than the other; they go hand in hand when bringing readers to your website. The strategies you use to raise domain authority will inevitably boost your topical authority.
Some Say Topical Authority is King
It’s easy to assume that topical authority is the one true authority in SEO because the words in search queries directly lead users to your content. As a result, users stay a while on sites that have thoroughly researched information, bouncing from article to article and answering question after question.
But you cannot forget that users need to see that your information is factual. They need to see backlinks, root domains, and internal links. They need to see reputable sources and recognizable names in the niche.
Topical authority may be the end goal, but domain authority is the entire journey.
Some Say Domain Authority Does Not Matter
There are some who believe that domain authority doesn’t really matter. For instance, Moz, the creator of the domain rating, states, “Domain authority is not a Google ranking factor and has no effect on the [search engine results pages].”
Further, John Mueller, a Search Advocate at Google, has confirmed on multiple occasions that Google never considers domain authority when ranking websites. (But you know that Google is not the only search engine.)
Those who feel that domain authority is not a ranking factor believe this because there are multiple websites that figure out domain ratings in different ways. Because there is no uniform set of metrics that all websites use to figure out domain authority, opponents of its ranking effectiveness claim the score cannot be trusted.
While we have to acknowledge that it may not help you rank in Google searches, domain authority is a valuable and useful metric for any website because it helps the content creator see where they rank with similar websites.
SEO Evolves as Technology Advances
Anyone who has run a website for the past few years can attest to the fact that SEO is ever-evolving as the technology that runs search engines advances.
For instance, the launch of Google’s Hummingbird update in August 2013 introduced the ability of the search engine to better understand conversational language in searches. Matt Cutts, a former Google Software Engineer, explained that “Hummingbird [was] a rewrite of the core algorithm” that Google used for its searches.
Next, Google introduced RankBrain to its algorithm in 2015. This was meant to help the algorithm further understand the context and meaning around the search query and not just the words being typed.
Cutts revealed that Google’s search engine algorithm has changed in two major ways:
- It can now recognize the important words in a search query.
- It doesn’t match singular keywords anymore.
In a nutshell, search engines are becoming smarter and can better decipher what a user’s intent is when entering a search query. This is why SEO is constantly changing; it adapts to the search engines that it optimizes.
How to Increase Domain Authority
Here are five ways to further your website’s authority:
| Strategy |
Explanation |
| Optimize your site’s URL. |
Create a URL that is focused, succinct, and features the proper keywords. |
| Ensure fast page speed. |
Take measures to keep your web pages loading within three seconds. |
| Name page titles and descriptions properly. |
All page titles and descriptions should be named according to user intent and targeted keywords. |
| Find the perfect keywords. |
Keywords should always cater to your niche and your audience. |
| Optimize your site’s images. |
Make sure to use high-resolution images and place proper keywords in titles and descriptions. |
It’s important to keep yourself updated on SEO trends as they change, so you can stay abreast of the latest strategies to get your website noticed.
Google’s E-A-T and Website Authority
Search Engine Journal predicted in 2021 that, within the next two years, about 25% of SEO ranking factors would be based on “expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness,” or E-A-T, compared to that year’s 9%. This is a significant increase and, these are the three key factors that you are influencing by raising your topical authority and domain authority.
As if right on cue, the prediction is coming true as topical authority and domain authority shoot to the front of the conversation surrounding SEO and website traffic.
Topical Authority and Domain Authority Work Together
Clearly, topical authority and domain authority work with one another to ensure that your website receives the most traffic and the highest rank possible. There are some who believe that domain authority doesn’t factor into Google’s website ranking, but there is no denying both the correlation and causation between topical and domain authority.
The bottom line is you will automatically raise your domain authority as you work on boosting your topical authority and vice versa.
by Benny | Nov 27, 2023
Improving your website’s User Experience is crucial to rank in Google and to keep your audience. How the user experiences your website determines whether they will engage with the content and return, or if they will leave and not look back.
You are aware of the importance of having a website that is visually appealing and easy to navigate. Relax, we are here to help you. In this article, we will discuss eight ways you can improve the user experience or UX of your website.
How Can We Improve User Experience?
There are quite a few ways in which website user experience can be improved. Each takes time when you are inexperienced with running a website. Let’s investigate some areas that can improve your UX.
Improving your user experience is a time-consuming task that often requires a lot of technical knowledge you may not have. Here is an outline of what we will focus on:
- Use Google Tools
- Utilizing White Space
- Practice SEO
- Write Quality Content
- Implement Marketing Strategies
- Edit your articles and your site
- Optimize Page Speed
- Fix 404s Quickly
- Repurpose Content
- Use a Professional Content Writing Service
Now we will explore each improvement in the following sections.
1. Use Google Search Console to Improve User Experience
Google Search Console and Google Analytics are excellent tools for website owners who need an inside look at the health of their websites. They help you with your search engine optimization.
When Google Search Console is used in conjunction with Google Analytics you will be able to
- Visualize your audience
- See how much time users spend on a page or your site
- Find where your website needs optimization to load faster, have organic traffic
- Fix URLS
- Track page indexing
- See Keyword Performance and more
Google Search Console and Google Analytics are free tools you can use. Google walks you through how to use these tools upon verifying your website.
If you are unfamiliar with HTML or how a website works, Google Search Console can feel like you’re learning a foreign language. Time, research, and practice are the best tools you can use when you optimize your site for search engines. This will also make your site more user-friendly.
It does take time and can be frustrating if there are a lot of fixes that need attention.
2. Utilize White Space on a Website
Having white space on your website and blog posts helps your audience stay attentive to your content. If your white space is taken up by numerous ads, or if you have walls of words, it can be difficult to concentrate.
You can fix this by:
- Allowing minimal advertising.
- Break up the text into smaller blocks.
- Make the page margins wider
- Optimize your page for readability on a mobile phone. Again this can be done with smaller blocks of text.
Interestingly, Placing ads at the top of your posts or your website may not be a good idea. This is not so much of a distraction for the reader, but it may be a distraction for Googlebot scanning your site.
Most of the time, bots can tell the difference between the content and the ads but don’t need to leave it to chance. With some basic coding, you can tell the bots that the ad space should not be included in the crawl.
By placing the <aside> HTML code within the ad block you can tell Googlebot not to crawl that section. Again, this takes experience, or time to learn how and where to apply this coding.
3. Write Quality Content That Grabs the Target Audience
Writing quality content that grabs your audience can be difficult to do. You need to understand who your target audience is and predict what questions they need answers to.
Your content should be original and personally engaging while giving your reader the answers they are looking for. This requires research into your audience.
- You should know where your audience can be found. For example, on social media.
- Search for questions and comments within your niche that you can research and answer.
- Research your topic
- Write the quality content your audience craves.
If you need ideas to get your creativity flowing, look at social media forums within your particular niche. These people are already asking the questions. It is up to you to find those questions and choose which ones to answer on your website.
After you excavate what your audience needs, you need to create an answer they can understand. Your content should bring something new and different to the user. This may require deep research, so you are not just rephrasing what others are talking about.
4. Implement Marketing Strategy to Help User Experience
Having a marketing strategy is very important to improving user experience on your website. A marketing strategy is designed to bring traffic to your site.
You should map out your marketing strategy to gain the most from your website.
Start with:
Having a well-defined marketing strategy will drive organic traffic to your site. Your site should reflect what your audience is looking for. By having compelling content and reliable products your readers will continuously return.
5. Optimize PageSpeed To Avoid Aggravation
When your website is loading quickly, your readers are more likely to stay and engage with the content. We must remember that everyone is very busy these days and we are used to having the content available in a flash of a second.
If your page is lagging when someone clicks on it, they are more likely to leave and find another site to answer their question. If you are wondering about your page speed, you can use the Google PageSpeed analyzer.
Enter your Web URL into the search bar and press enter. It will then scan your website and give you feedback on how quickly your page is loading. If there are problems this tool will point them out.
You may need to research what each problem or error is to fix your website and have it run at optimal speed. It is amazing how much information you can obtain from this tool! It can also make you feel ill if your website is filled with problems and errors.
Take a deep breath and tackle each issue one step at a time. Before you know it, you will have optimized your website for speed. Having your page load quickly determines if Google will recommend it to searchers, so it’s very important to have excellent page speed health.
6. Repurpose Content to Make the Whole Site Better
By repurposing your old content, you can bring new life and new traffic to those pages. At the same time, repurposing your work will be faster, saving you time when you are writing.
Just because you wrote an article last year, does not mean that it is irrelevant now. Give those older pages a make over and add new:
And, check all of the links within the post to make sure none are broken.
Final Thoughts
All of the above steps take a lot of time and experience. You can save more than 30 hours a week by hiring help from a professional writing content agency.
TextGoods is an excellent Content Agency. We provide you with:
- Professional ghostwriters work closely with our professional editorial team.
- Keyword Research and a Hit List.
- Social Media Management.
- Content Repurposing.
- Unlimited Revisions within the first week of delivery.
It takes around five business days for one article to be completed by our team and returned to you, and you receive your articles as they are completed.
