Blog Topic Ideas - Misfired Searches

  25 Jul 2007 by Vyoma

This is a part of the Blog Topic Idea series.

This tip will convince you, if not for other reasons, that you should analyze your traffic.  It will help you get topic ideas.

I use Google Analytics for all my sites, and for Wordpress driven blogs, I use the Wordpress.com Stats Plugin.  When I need to get new blog topic ideas, I go to the search terms that were used to land into your sites.

You will notice that most of the search terms will be a ‘bulls eye’ target on your blog posts.  But you will also notice that there are many misfires.  Some of the misfires are quite stupid and are not usable.  (’How to make apple pie’ landing on your Mac blog).  Some others are with in your niche but it would be a tiny part of one of your blog post.

Collect all such misfired search phrase, and write blog posts around them. 

For example, here is a misfired search phrase that lands them at KalaaLog.

Misfired Searches

I have no blog post specific to that, and I am working on writing a blog post targeted at that.

The logic behind choosing these misfired searches is that you know there are people looking for information on them.  And it is quite probable that the specific topic would be useful for your readers since it is already with in your niche.

It does not matter what analytics you use.  But be aware of all the search terms that lead to your site, and it can give you a lot of topic ideas.

11 Responses so far

  1. dEEPAK July 25, 2007 3:04 pm

    yup.. It helps a lot.. I’ve done this and my traffic from searches (mostly google) has increased a lot since then..

  2. Vyoma July 25, 2007 4:52 pm

    Yes Deepak. After some point of time, the effect starts to compound, and more search engine traffic comes in as your blog grows more in depth.

  3. Blogging Tip - How to get the topics to write about ? : Tips, News, Opinions by ReviewSaurus July 25, 2007 4:54 pm

    [...] Misfired Searches [...]

  4. Wishlost July 25, 2007 7:27 pm

    Well this gives me an idea to write a great post .. getting to work on it and you’ll see one before this week ends :) ..

    Something which will help get traffic as well as improve your blogs visibility around the keywords, Google thinks your blogs optimized :)

    ~Gautam

  5. Vyoma July 26, 2007 12:53 am

    I am glad that it helped you, Gautam. :)

  6. Sunil Parmar July 26, 2007 8:51 am

    Hi there,
    I’m new on the technical blogsphere & using Google analytics.
    It’s an amazing tool & i’ll analyze the keywords when search engines start pouring traffic to my blog.
    :smile:

  7. Vyoma July 26, 2007 12:29 pm

    Yes Sunil - there is a disadvantage with this method that you cannot use it for a brand new blog. But if it is a brand new blog - one willl have enough to write about, won’t they?

  8. Shankar Ganesh July 27, 2007 11:28 am

    Haha.. nice idea :D thanks for sharing.

  9. Vyoma July 27, 2007 2:17 pm

    You are welcome, Shankar. :)

  10. Ed July 29, 2007 4:33 pm

    That is a good tip. I have become an authority on Zwinky tool bar, by mistake I think. When I learn that people are now searching for naked zwinky, what is a humor blogger to do but keep ripping into Zwinky.

  11. Vyoma July 29, 2007 5:49 pm

    Yes Ed. Some times you will have to let your readers and visitors lead how your blog grows.

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