Table of Contents
Lifehacker talks about the basic principles of selecting and testing ideas, as well as about services that will help with this.
When it comes to topics, SEOs usually make up the semantic core, that is, the complete list of search queries that cover the topic of the site. But if the media writes about everything, the core can have millions of keywords. Collecting it and grouping requests is long and difficult, without the help of professional SEOs you can’t do it here. Yes, and using such an array of information is not very convenient.
If you are not yet ready to hire SEO specialists and just want to experiment with search, see how much traffic it can bring, try selecting topics manually, pointwise. This will bear fruit.
Lifehacker started using this strategy 5 years ago.Since then, we’ve written 4,000 articles that bring in up to 17 million sessions a month from search alone.We experimented a lot and, of course, not always successfully.Yes, some materials didn’t make a splash, while others became regular sources of traffic.For example, aselectionof homemade mayonnaise recipes has attracted about 3 million search visitors since 2018, whiletipson how to lower blood pressure have attracted almost 4 million.Alina Mashkovtseva, Chief Editor of Lifehacker
What topics to look for
To be more precise, our task is to find the keywords that people most often enter into the search bar of the browser. And it is important to remember what options there may be.
Variety
If you’re just starting out with search potential, it’s OK to use obvious queries. But sooner or later they will end and the most interesting thing will come – researching what other topics can bring traffic from the search.
So, almost any. Because people are looking for different things, including the very unexpected.
For example, most of us took our first steps at the age of about a year. It seems that walking is something simple and understandable. Nevertheless, the question of how to do this correctly is asked to Yandex 857 times a month.
Therefore, experimenting in everything related to content is, in principle, a good habit.
Pretty narrow
Most often, users are looking for something specific. In order for them to find it on your site, you need to try to think like them. And even at the stage of selection of the topic.
If it seems to you that you have found a brilliant topic, do not be too lazy to go to the search engine with it and look at least the first page of the issue. The offers there do not necessarily match your key 100%. But they show what and how your potential readers are looking for. Robots are good at guessing the needs of people because they analyze a large amount of data. And if you want to attract as many visitors as possible, you should not neglect this information.
Informational
In general, keys can be divided into three types:
- Informational . In these cases, users need some information, instructions. For example, how to cook zucchini, get rid of cockroaches or choose the best cloud storage.
- Commercial or transactional . People do not want words, but specific offers where you can buy something, order, download, and so on. These verbs, single-root words, as well as “price” and an indication of the city, for example, “cakes in Moscow,” are signs that you won’t get into the search results with the article.
- The rest . It is not clear from these keys what the user needs. For example, a person introduces “air conditioning into a car.” But what is he going to do with it? Buy? Choose? Install?
Information keys are what the media needs. Transactional should be left to stores. Even if your instruction accidentally ends up in commercial results, it is unlikely that the user will be interested in it. He did not come to the search engine for this. This means there will be no traffic.
You can also consider the keys from the “Other” group, because in the issuance, usually the offers of companies alternate with articles.
Naturally, the opinions of search engines about the type of request may differ from yours. Therefore, check the issuance manually or use special services. For example, ” Checking keywords for commercialization ” by Alexander Arsenkin shows for free what Yandex thinks.
The service considered the request “buy an air conditioner” as a commercial one with an indicator of 100% (which was predictable), and “choose an air conditioner” – on the contrary, informational. Accordingly, the second option is better for media.
Another Arsenkin tool suggests which types of sites are more in the top 10, top 20, top 30 according to your request. The service checks the issuance of Yandex for free, Google – by subscription.
Where to look for material ideas to search
Keep in mind that most of the tools that we will talk about next show the past. To write about trends, you need to follow the information field and study Google Trends .
in my head
This is the most obvious source of ideas. Search engine-friendly texts answer questions from people just like you. So, if you periodically slow down your stream of thoughts and isolate keywords from it, this can already lead to the appearance of many useful articles.
Write down ideas, even if they seem strange or naive. First, people are interested in different things. Secondly, the idea can be twisted. But more on that below.
Start with your own thoughts anyway. This will make it easier to use many services.
In the service “Selecting words” from “Yandex”
The tool, also known as ” Yandex.Wordstat “, helps to search for ideas and evaluate their potential at the same time.
If you enter a word or phrase in the service input field, then in the left column it will show all requests known to Yandex that contain this key. In the right column are options similar to it.
If you click on each of the keywords, you can see even more queries associated with each of them. But keep in mind: you can’t evaluate the prospects of a topic by the numbers next to the requests. They indicate the sum of impressions of different options. So, the number next to the phrase “movies about love” is the total number of impressions for all queries with these words: “Russian films about love”, “watch movies about love”, and so on.
Sometimes it happens that the idea of the text is very ambitious and you want to narrow it down. But it is not clear in which direction to dig. For example, you plan to write about the best board games – but which ones? In this case (and in any other, if you want to see verbose queries), put the phrase in quotes in the input field. And inside them, repeat the noun, verb, or even a pronoun or preposition two, three or more times – as many words as you want to see in the request.
For example, in response to the query “best board games for for”, the service will show keywords of six words, where three are “best board games”, and the rest are selected by Wordstat for them as a popular addition: “for a company of adults”, “ for the whole family” or “for 7 years”.
Google’s Keyword Planner
To use this tool , you need to register with Google Ads. In this case, the average number of impressions will be a fork with a fairly large spread.
Still, the service can be a good source of new ideas. After all, it works on slightly different algorithms than Yandex.Wordstat.
В Ubersuggest
An ideal option for those who do not want to register with Google Ads is a service from the famous online marketer Neil Patel. The free version of Ubersuggest allows you to get quite a lot of information.
Type in the Keyword Ideas section the idea you want to work on.
Keys containing your word or phrase of interest will appear in the Related tab. In the Volume column – the number of requests during the month. If you click on the arrow, you will get a download of the top 10 Google search results for free.
In Yandex, Google and YouTube search suggestions
When you start typing something in the search engine, it tries to guess what you are looking for and suggests options. The algorithm does this based on your search history, your region, and trends. The latter is especially interesting: thanks to hints, you can find a query that is gaining popularity and ride on the crest of the hype wave.
If you do not want to look for clues manually, there are services. For example Serpstat . In the free version, you can select the “Search suggestions” section and check which words are adjacent to the beginning of the key phrase.
Among search engine association phrases
Algorithms try not only to predict, but also to refine your request. Therefore, phrases associated with the original keyword appear at the bottom of the search page. It is possible that it is there that ideas for your future articles are hidden.
Competitors
After the release of Austin Kleon’s book Steal Like an Artist, it became embarrassing to admit that you can peep other people’s ideas and transform them into something more beautiful. What is worth doing if fresh thoughts have ceased to come to mind.
Everyone perfectly understands how to do it manually: read other people’s sites and think about what would look good on yours. But you can also use special services. Let’s talk about this in more detail.
The first thing to do is to identify your competitors. The more niche sites are, the easier it will be to work with them: you will almost never have to filter out irrelevant keywords. The following recommendation follows from this: if you write on different topics, look for competitors in each niche separately.
There are three ways to determine suitable options:
- Use special services . For example, SimilarWeb allows you to enter the site address into the search bar and see competitors on the Competitors tab. SE Ranking works similarly . When it comes to a niche site, these tools can help. But if we talk about Lifehacker, the competitors are the same media combines.
- Study ratings . For example, Liveinternet and Rambler . In them, you can choose a topic and see the most popular sites on it.
- Manually iterate over common requests, and then turn to services . The most effective way, and at the same time the most difficult. You need to come up with several queries related to a specific topic, drive them into Google or Yandex and see which sites are in the search results. And then drive them through the services indicated in the first paragraph.
However, finding competitors is half the battle, you need to find out for what queries they get traffic. For this, for example, the old version of MegaIndex and ” Bukvariks ” are suitable. Enter the site address – get the keys.
How to test an idea
You have done a great job and compiled a long list of topics. Now you need to understand whether they can really bring readers from the search. This is done in several steps.
Find out if keywords are often searched
Enter the key phrase in “Yandex.Wordstat” and put it in quotation marks. The service will show how many times a specific keyword without additional words, but in different forms, showed “Yandex” last month.
In addition to quotes that fix the number of words, Wordstat has other operators. You will need them much less often, but you should know about them:
- + allows you to take into account the service parts of speech (conjunctions, prepositions, particles) and pronouns.
- [ ] reinforce word order. In this case, all word forms, service parts of speech, pronouns are taken into account.
- ! fixes the form of the word (number, case, tense).
Operators can be shared. It is believed that the quotation marks and the exclamation point allow you to get the so-called exact request frequency, which is better used to predict traffic to the site. But in most cases, quotes will suffice for you.
Check different wording
Try to use synonyms of words in the keyword, cognates. The result may be different. For example, Yandex showed 2,402 results for the query “how to get a tax deduction” in September 2021.
But “how to issue a tax deduction” – only 711 times.
If there are foreign words in the keyword, try to write them in Latin and Cyrillic. Android and “android” in the query may give different results.
Consider seasonality
“Yandex.Wordstat” shows the number of requests for the last month. But some themes are strongly related to the season. For example, in January, few people are looking for what to cook from zucchini. But in August there are even more such requests than memes, how everyone is handing out zucchini to each other, because they don’t know what to do with them.
You can check the seasonality by selecting the “History of Requests” option.
Unfortunately, only the + operator works in the History tab. Therefore, you can only roughly estimate the potential of the request.
Make sure you haven’t posted such a text yet
If you already have material on your website or blog that ranks high on demand, then it’s hardly worth writing a second one on this topic. It seems that if two texts are in the top, there will be twice as much traffic. In fact, articles can start competing with each other and one of them will simply stop bringing readers, because it will go lower in the search results.
Things to keep in mind to get the most out of search engines
- It’s important to experiment. Almost any article can bring search traffic. So it’s worth testing every idea.
- The keyword should exactly match the future article. Therefore, always put yourself in the place of the user who drives a query into the search box. Try to think like him, meet his expectations. When in doubt, examine the search results for the query.
- Do not compete with stores. Therefore, forget about keywords with “price”, the verbs “buy”, “download”, “order” and other words with the same root, as well as indicating the locality.
- Ideas can be found everywhere, including in your own head. But it is worth checking them with the help of services to make sure that the topic is of interest not only to you.
- It doesn’t take much time to work with Yandex.Wordstat. But it allows you to concretize the topic and get more traffic. Well, or to understand that it is not worth spending a media resource on its development.
