By lbrowning@hubspot.com (Laura M. Browning)

I love to do content research — what’s more satisfying than falling down a few Google rabbit holes? (Don’t answer that.)

Of course, great marketing content is built on more than just Google search results. I’ve put together a six-step guide to how I do my own content research for HubSpot blog posts using a real-life example.

Table of Contents

• What is content research?
• Why is content research important?
• Components of Content Research
• How to Do Content Research

On the one hand, content research is exactly what it sounds like — researching content. But it’s a deceptively simple term for a process that’s a lot more complex than a few Google searches.

Put into marketing terms, content research is the systematic process of gathering information to create valuable content that meets your readers’ needs, furthers your business goals, and ranks in search results.

Why is content research important?

Thoughtful and thorough research will reward you with compelling, engaging, and genuinely helpful content. You’re probably already doing keyword research (if not, learn the basics!), and you probably already know subject-matter experts in your company or network. Content research will connect all these points together.

And “genuinely helpful” cannot be understated. If you understand search intent and can answer your users’ questions, you’re establishing your brand as an authority, setting yourself up for return visitors, and showing Google that you know your stuff.

Having a structured research plan will help with other aspects of your content workflow, like a marketing calendar or editorial calendar, content intelligence, and any other tools you and your team use to maintain a well-oiled marketing machine.

Components of Content Research

Although the sub-steps of content marketing research may look a little different depending on your project and field — we’ll get into that in the next section — there are a few basics that are foundational to great content.

Keyword Research

Begin at the beginning, as they say. Keyword research is the gateway to analyzing search intent that answers not just your users’ initial questions, but also their follow-up questions (and maybe even questions they didn’t know they had).

You can check out our beginner’s guide to keyword research, but here are the main elements to keep in mind:

• Relevance: Your content will only rank for a keyword if it meets the searchers’ needs.
• Authority: Google provides more weight to sources it deems authoritative.
• Volume: Volume is measured by MSV (monthly search volume), which means the number of times the keyword is searched per month across all audiences.

Audience Research

You probably already know who your target audience is, and you may even have customer or buyer personas. Also consider search intent and follow-up questions.

If I’m writing marketing content about bedding, let’s say, there’ll be a substantial difference in the audience for budget bedding versus …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron