In the summer, the content team here at Market My Market helped craft an article that discussed three of our favorite tools for researching blog topics. As someone who has spent the past decade navigating the content marketing world – many years of which have been in the legal space – I wanted to contribute a few of our tips and tricks for manufacturing content ideas.

The content team spends so much time producing content plans that, at this point, they’ve become second nature to us. Of course, it’s still no easy task to create topic ideas month after month that are unique, interesting, and traffic-inducing. That’s true for anyone. But if your firm has a few tricks up their sleeve, you’ll not only save yourself time and energy, but your new and improved content ideas will monumentally impact the number of impressions your site sees.

These techniques, gathered through years of trial and error, should help you produce better and more significant ideas for the pages on your website.

Forums and Message Boards

We’ve utilized this tactic from the very beginning. Even though engagement on sites like Avvo has faded over the past few years, you can still find a great deal of stored responses.

When utilizing Avvo, don’t forget that you can sort your queries by practice area and even state. Learn more about Avvo’s Q&A function here.

Of course, there are plenty of other sites besides Avvo that are useful like Quora and Reddit. These resources house hundreds of thousands of threads that provide the reader with responses that can surely be melded into blog topics. Using these boards, you can discover the questions that real users are searching and discovering which can help inform you as a law firm what’s missing from the legal blogosphere.

Social Media Groups

Social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are home to thousands of niche groups. These individuals often pose questions to the greater community which can then be used to help inform you of certain popular topics that can be answered in the form of a blog.

You may not be able to learn too much about matters relating to criminal defense and personal injury on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, but you can certainly discover topics like finance, estate planning, and professional groups (B2B).

After you’ve produced content related to a certain thread or group, it may be in your best interest to post a link to your blog in order to drive additional traffic to your website.

Clients and Potential Clients

Don’t be afraid to make use of your own clients. If they seem to be posing the same types of questions over and over again, why not translate some of these queries into blogs?

Though every case is different, it’s fairly common for most potential clients to have similar questions, at least in the beginning. Make sure that each of these questions are answered on your site in blog form. When you hear something new or interesting, write it down. 

Google News

Sometimes, your blog page can benefit from current events. Google News provides a great outlet for law firms to utilize when trying to come up with blog topics. Of course, not every Google News article will concern your firm, but it’s still smart to understand what the media is emphasizing. Though current event topics don’t often do well in the long run, they seem to be what readers are most interested in in the moment, from popular topics to breaking news. 

It may also be smart to view news articles based on a specific time period. To do so, click News > Tools > Recent > select a time frame or choose a custom time range. 

You can also sort your query by blogs only, which you can do by clicking Tools and then the All News dropdown option, as shown in the image below. 

Related Searches

Related searches on search engines like Google aren’t commonly exploited by marketing teams who are coming up with blog ideas, but this resource is extremely advantageous for those who find themselves stuck in the mud. You’ll find related searches—automatically generated words or phrases based on an algorithm that produces terms aligned to your search—placed at the bottom of the search engine page. These terms can also be tremendously useful in order to ascertain what users are searching besides the keyword phrase for which you’ve optimized.

In addition, you can find these related terms using online tools like Answer The Public, which is a fantastic resource that outlines the ways in which users pose questions and variations on how they do so.

Competitor Research

Taking a look at competitor research can help inform why certain users are drawn to some businesses over others. Moreover, competitor research provides you with an easy way to discover subject matter that already has plenty of research. It’s important to understand why these topics are being written about and discussed. Don’t be afraid to reuse some of the more popular topics as long as they have a slight variation.

Blog Topic Research Strategies That Produce Results

Using these methods, the content team at Market My Market has produced winning blog topics that address the needs of our clients and their audiences. Likewise, these top-notch topics allow their correlated blogs to excel on search engine results. As you begin to produce your next content plan, give some of these methods a go. It won’t be long until you have your own list of blue-ribbon topics that increase traffic, improve your overall search engine rank, and draw in a larger audience. 

At Market My Market, we’re thinkers, writers, and learners who love coming up with fresh ideas for our clients. To learn how we can boost your content marketing game, contact us for a free consultation.