When writing content for a website, is it better to do some research first to find search terms that people are actually searching upon, or is it better to just write everything that is in your head in the hope that something you’ve written will stick and become a busy page?
The thing is, being an SEO guy I would naturally tell people to research first. Take the subject they were going to write about, plug a few keywords in to the Keyword Suggestion Tool at SEO Book and find out what people are actually searching for. Then take your revised list of search terms and write the article round those. That way you’d have a better chance of people actually finding what you’ve written once it’s indexed.
But what if that is what everyone is doing? Unless you are in a really obscure niche, chances are that other people are doing the same thing and have written pages before you based on roughly the same set of search terms. Furthermore, their site might be older and be better ranked. If there are a lot more people who have done this then you might be fighting a losing battle to get in that first page of the search engine results.
Could it be better to ignore the research and instead maybe just be lucky enough to get a number one placement in Google for a term that gets maybe 1% as much traffic as the main term that you would have researched. At least that way you will get some traffic to the page rather than none at all.
There is a place for research, but perhaps we shouldn’t be focusing on the big-hitting search terms and instead just let our content speak for itself, at least to start with. Let the results come naturally and we might be surprised. If it doesn’t come to anything we can revise it based on some SEO research.
I wouldn’t recommend this tactic if all you have is a small website with a few pages of content – then you’ll need all the SEO help you can get. If you are generating new content on a daily or weekly basis though, it could be worth just trying it.
