How to Research Content for Your Blog Post

Before writing your blog post masterpiece, you must prepare the necessary resources to help you write it.

Some people just wing it when writing their blog posts, and they may achieve a certain level of success with this process. However, if you want your content to cut through the clutter and provide your readers with the blog content possible, you must consider taking a more deliberate approach with your blog writing. It starts with your research process.

This post will help you refine how to research content for your blog post. This step-by-step process will help you produce valuable, actionable, and helpful content. And by using the same process in all of your blog post research, you can build a rabid blog following.

Scour the Web for Competition

Once you have a topic you want to discuss on your blog, check out what other websites say about it. A quick search on Google will reveal to you the top pages discussing the topic.

These pages are ranking on top of organic search for the topic, which means they’re doing something right. From here, collect what you feel are the top pages from the search result and analyze them. 

Figure out what made Google decide that these pages appear as one of the top pages for the topic. Read the content and check out the questions it answers and subtopics it covered about the subject. Also, check out the formatting of the posts—see if the content has lots of images or videos.

List down the good things that you think and feel the pages did to warrant their rankings on Google search. Then take these things and apply them to your content to make it as good—if not better—than the competition. Doing so should convince Google that your page should eventually rank on top for the topic.

Search for Questions to Answer About the Topic

The researched pages in the previous step should provide you with enough information to write your content. But you want to get over and above to make the best possible content about the topic you wish to cover.

So to help expand your research, you must look for additional questions you should discuss and answer in your content.

There’s a People Also Ask (PAA) section from Google search containing the most relevant questions about the topic.

If you click on one of the questions to reveal the answer, two additional questions appear at the bottom of the section to provide you with more questions to consider answering in your content.

You can also go to Quora to find the top questions people ask about the topic.

More importantly, you can find multiple answers to each question, making research much more effortless. You can simply compile the best answers from here and rewrite them into your article to make them your own.

Use Answer the Public as well to exhaust all possible questions you should cover in your article. 

It produces a multitude of questions you can answer in your article. You can also use an alphabet soup section as additional subtopics or write a brand new article for each keyword suggestion.

Finally, another neat tactic you can use is blogger outreach. While this is commonly used to acquire backlinks to your site, you can use the same process of reaching out to bloggers. But instead of asking them for backlinks, ask them for answers to some of the questions you wish to answer in your blog post.

By targeting influential bloggers for their quotes to include in your post, you can get them to answer the tough questions you encounter in your research. At the same time, you build relationships with them that you can further leverage in the future—it’s a win-win!

Build Your Outline

Finally, you should have all the necessary information to help you produce an outline for your article.

The advantage of developing an outline before writing it is to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your piece. Aside from adding the subtopics and questions you plan on discussing in the article, you should also include the following:

• Statistics to help support your arguments and points. Refer to reliable case studies from authoritative sources like Statista to erase all doubt about the validity of the findings.
• Images and videos you should include in the article. Sites like Pixabay and Pexels are good places to start searching for free stock photos. Ideally, you should edit them using Canva to make them unique since there’s a good chance other sites will be using the same stock photo you want to use. As for videos, find the most relevant ones on YouTube to embed in your article.
• Internal and external links to include in the post. Ideally, you should always strive to link to relevant internal pages to prevent people from leaving your website. But if you haven’t any relevant content about the subtopic or idea, it’s best to link to a reliable source instead. The goal is to provide value to readers by pointing them to great content that will help explain the subtopic in greater detail.

By laying down all the information you must discuss in your article, writing will be much easier.

Conclusion

The key to writing a great blog post lies in how you conduct your research before writing it. The research is time-consuming, which leaves you better off passing this responsibility to a website content service provider like TopContent. But if you want to acquire this skill so you can implement it across all the articles you’ll be writing moving forward, it’s best to follow the simple steps above now.