Topic Research Slidedeck

We worked with our friend Darren Johnson to create this slide deck on content topic research, using some of our favorite sources.

Slide 1 – Topic Research

Slide 2 – The Rundown

  • Topic research
    • SERP surfing
    • Online tools
    • Forum websites
    • Sales team
    • Customer success team
  • Recap

Slide 3 – Topic Research

Slide 4 – Our favorite ways to mine for topics

1. SERP surfing

  1. Forum websites
  2. Snippet tools
  3. Sales team
  4. Customer success team
  5. Customer forum

Slide 5 – SERP surfing

Slide 6 – How do you surf the SERPs?

  • Type your query into the search box of your favorite search engine
  • Let’s take “blockchain” as our high-level topic
  • Do an incognito search for the term

Slide 7 – Audit the SERPs

Ask yourself the following questions:

  • What websites rank?
  • What information do the ranking websites provide?

Slide 8 – Audit the SERPs (Con’t)

How do they provide this information

  • Infographic?
  • Slide deck?
  • Video?
  • Blog post?

Slide 9 – Audit the SERPs (Con’t)

Answering these questions will:

  • Give you topics to write about
  • Give you ideas on what mediums to use to share that content

Slide 10 – Online tools

Slide 11 – Answer The Public

Answer The Public uses the autocomplete data from search engines to show you the popular topics and questions people look for

Free account has a limited number of search queries a day

Slide 12 – Answer The Public (con’t)

You’ll receive visualizations that show:

  • Questions related to your keyword
  • Prepositions related to your keyword
  • Comparisons related to your keyword

Slide 13 – Answer The Public (con’t)

You’ll also receive an alphabetical list of phrases containing your keyword

You can download everything for later use

Slide 14 – Also Asked

Also Asked uses data from People Also Asked snippets to return questions related to your keyword

Slide 15 – Also Asked (Con’t)

Also Asked returns a visualization of how the questions connect through the snippets

Mine topics and FAQs from this data

Slide 16 – Forum Websites

Slide 17 – Using Quora

Quora is a forum website

Use it to investigate what people are searching for about a given topic

Slide 18 – Quora topic mining

Type your high-level topic into the search bar

You’ll be able to search

  • The overall term
  • Quora spaces

Slide 19 – Quora topic mining (Con’t)

Mine the search results for topics/questions you can answer on your blog, in your FAQs, and on social media

Slide 20 – Using Reddit

Like Quora, Reddit is a forum website

Slide 21 – Reddit topic mining

Type your high-level topic into the search bar

You’ll see different communities you can join

Slide 22 – Reddit topic mining (Con’t)

You can mine topics from community discussions

Slide 23 – Sales team

Slide 24 – How does a sales team help create content?

Your sales team interacts with your target audience regularly

Have your salespeople collect questions asked by potential customers during calls or email exchanges

Slide 25 – Create FAQs from sales interactions

Use the most asked questions to build an FAQ center

Slide 26 – Customer success team

Slide 27 – Using customer surveys to create content

Have your customer success team send out quarterly surveys asking their accounts what content they’d like to see

Add this content to your blog, your newsletter, and in sales emails

Here is a link to an example survey

Slide 28 – Recap 28

Slide 29 – Content comes from many places

  • SERP surfing
  • Quora
  • Online tools

Slide 30 – Content comes from many places (Con’t)

  • Sales team
  • Customer success team

Slide 31 – Use a mix for perfect content chemistry

Each source has different audiences, with different needs

Use all of these tools to widen your topic choices

You’ll diversify your content topics and your content types

Slide 32 – Thanks! ANY QUESTIONS? You can find me at: Twitter – @GrDataSolutions 32