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3 New Tools That Can Help You Create Better Content, Convert More Readers and Conquer Higher Search Rankings

This guest post is by Neil Patel of Quick Sprout.

Anybody can be a content marketer … but not everyone can be a good or even great content marketer who creates articles that convert and rank high in the search engines on a consistent basis.

Over time experience will teach you how to do this, but you also need the right tools.

You need tools that will help you spot the hot topics at that very moment, generate list upon list of high-converting long-tail keywords, automate some of your processes, and even show you the best places to publish your content.

In the last several months four very cool tools have come onto the scene that will help you do just that. Eric showed us one of them—the Content Strategy Generator Tool—earlier today, but I wanted to show you three others that are definitely worth experimenting with.

IFTTT: Automate your content curation tasks

IFTTTYour first experience of IFTTT may seem a bit like a head-scratcher. That’s why IFTTT has given you some very specific “recipes” to add.

What exactly is a “recipe”?

That’s just a set of commands to perform an action when certain conditions are met. That’s what the acronoym means: If This, Then That.

How can this tool help you create compelling, high-converting content? It will basically automate tasks that you normally do.

For example, Evernote is the ultimate tool bloggers use to save ideas we come across on the web. Even though the steps to save that content to Evernote are pretty simple, wouldn’t it be nice to accomplish two tasks in one—and even eliminate some steps in the process?

Standford Smith recently shared his favorite IFTTT recipes that make content curation painless:

When curation tasks like these are automated for you, you can concentrate on creating better content that will convert more readers and rank higher.

Übersuggest: the keyword search tool on steroids

If you want a keyword search tool that will help you build a highly relevant and targeted list of long-tail keywords, then you need Übersuggest.

Ubersuggest

It combines Google Suggest with other services, and it’s simple to use. Just write a keyword in the box, choose a language, and get suggestions.

You can break these down into just normal web searches, or you can look for terms in verticals like video, shopping, and news. If you click on one of the keywords it then delivers even more suggestions:

Ubersuggest

There are literally thousands of content ideas you could get from these real user queries.

Click the plus sign and this will put the keywords in a bucket:

Ubersuggest

After you’ve selected a few more keywords, you can then click “Get” and then copy and paste these keywords:

Ubersuggest

If you want to take this idea a step further, throw out all those keywords that won’t work for you. Those remaining drop into Google’s keyword suggestion tool.

From that list you can grab the hottest trending keywords and create some high-converting content that also ranks well.

Google Insights: 4 ways to boost your content conversion rates

In its most basic use, Google Insights for Search is great for seeing what people are searching for using broad terms, or narrow ones.

But as a content marketer, you are looking to use Google Insights to help you create highly-targeted content that will boost your conversion rates.

Google Insights offers four ways to do that, using its filters. The first filter we’ll look at is the Web Search.

The Web Search filter

Let’s say you’re a real estate agent in Seattle. You are looking to create some articles for your blog, but you are tired of talking about home prices and want some fresh and relevant topics to discuss.

Google Insights

To keep the content tight and focused on your market, you can filter the content to your region and restrict results to those from the last three months. Then, choose “real estate” as the category.

Note: Leave the “Search terms” box blank if you want to see what’s trending.

This is what you could see:

Google Insights

What you care about here are the Rising Searches and the Breakout search terms.

As you can see, when I did this search, the “Trayvon Martin case” was a hugely popular term in the real estate category. Perhaps you could create some fresh content around issues like the pros and cons of living in a gated community, or a guide to creating a voluntary Neighborhood Watch program. Both are highly-qualified topics that could rank high.

The Image Search filter

The next filter you can use to generate some high-converting content ideas is Image Search. This time you will enter some search terms.

Let’s say you’re a graphic designer and you want to see what’s trending among images. You choose “book covers,” “email newsletters,” and “desktop.”

Google Insights

Your results will show you that the email newsletter topic is flat-lining, but the desktop topic is flying high!

Google Insights

That means you need to roll up your sleeves and focus your content on a topic like desktop design. If I were you, I’d use the CSGT or Übersuggest to generate some very refined keywords that will attract that right people and convert well for you.

The News Search filter

The third filter to try is the News Search. This is another one that works really well if you leave the search terms box blank.

Imagine you are a blogger who covers technology, so you enter a search in the News. You make it a worldwide search in the last 90 days, and select Computers & Electronics.

Google Insights

Your results will look something like this for that time range:

Google Insights

Notice how Apple dominates the top six spots, but doesn’t hold place two and four? Those offer some interesting possibilities for content creation.

For example, “anonymous” refers to the hacktivist group Anonymous—you may want to cover their latest efforts. And the “galaxy s3” refers to the latest rumors about this smartphone. Perhaps you can follow that as a possible story idea.

Either way, these will be hot, trending topics that could help you land some heavy traffic!

The Product Search filter

The last filter we’ll look at is the Product Search filter. Anyone who sells anything can use this—and it doesn’t have to be a physical product. It could be an information product or even a service.

Say you have a blog from which you sell stock buying information in the form of email alerts, and you want to relate something back to one of your products.

Search “worldwide” and “finance” without putting anything in the “search terms”.

Google Insights

Here’s what you will get:

Google Insights

Because it was tax season when I ran this search, most of the searches were around the topics of taxes. But what is sr22? And why is it breaking out? Click on it and you get this report:

Google Insights

This is important, because the “sr22” search term can refer to a number of things, including insurance, pistol, or an airplane.

These particular searches, however, are focused on finance, which should give us a clue that this topics is probably about insurance. The subcategory tells us that it is most definitely about insurance.

Click on “Insurance” and you’ll see that sr22 is a specific kind of auto insurance. Now you can create content around sr22 auto insurance, and then tie it back into one of your products, capturing the attention of—and hopefully some conversions from—highly-relevant traffic.

The blogger’s favorite tool/s

In the end, if you want to succeed as a content marketer, then you need to know what type of content is working, what topics are trending well and which keywords are relevant to your context. The tools above will help you find that out.

These tools as they are your key to creating content that not only ranks well but converts readers into subscribers or customers.

Are there any other new tools that I missed that will help a content market create better content? Share them in the comments.

Neil Patel is an online marketing consultant and the co-founder of KISSmetrics. He also blogs at Quick Sprout.

About Guest Blogger
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Comments
  1. I didn’t know about any of those tools, Neil. However I like to use many tools on my Chrome explorer, or even better, many tools on my Smartphone to analyze websites, check statistics and even plan my agenda. Thank you for the post.

  2. For my blog, I borrowed a couple of images from Google Image Search for a music review, and now I received 1-2 hits per day for people searching for those kinds of images.

    I’m not sure how to convert those kinds of people though, since their primary purpose is to mostly look at the image more closely or take it for their own purposes.

    • You should not take images from google image search because the images that are on the websites may be copyrighted.

      • There is an option within Google Images search to filter only Creative Commons licensed content, which is fine to share depending on whether it has been made available for commercial/non-commercial websites.

        But in general most people don’t seem to bother, and you’re right that you shouldn’t use any images which aren’t CC licensed or that you haven’t obtained a specific license to use.

  3. Great article. IFTTT is one of the most innovative things i have seen recently. It helped me a lot in automating tasks related to my blog. Worth checking out.

  4. I just started using Evernote to help create digital portfolios for students at the school where I work. Until now, I’ve been using Journler for all my content curation, but IFTTT might be the final push I need to fully migrate over to Evernote. Thanks!

  5. As always, very helpful post from Neil. Never knew you can do so much with Evernote.

  6. Thanks for that!

    I never heard about Ubersuggest. Just tried it in my language and it works great.
    I also forgot about how usefull evernote is.

    Thank you for this post.

  7. Thanks Neil for helpful article.

  8. Hi Neil,

    Helpful breakdown here.

    Serve up what people want, content wise. The tools you note can help you do it. Stay current. Many mistakenly write about topics which were popular 10 months ago. Some ideas are timeless but if you want to stay on the ball it pays to stay current. Find out what people are querying. Serve up helpful, relevant usable content in that area. Persistently. Write 1 post a day, churn out an article or 2 each day, and you are golden.

    I recently learned the power of long tail keywords. I intended to use long tails and stuck with this strategy for a while. Makes more sense to specialize than to go up against the big boys or girls. Specialize, target, prosper. Get super specific. Don’t hesitate to stretch out the long tails. My girlfriend and I sometimes laugh when observing how people pop up on our blogs. The long tails seem absurd, but people really do dig deep, drill down and search for hyper specific terms. Nail a few of these niche-relevant terms, corner a niche and you can make a fortune as you rank high for particular terms day after day. Specialization and persistence wins in this game.

    Google Insights seems particularly discerning. Helpful tool for anybody who wants to drill down their search with ease. The more you focus on a hyper targeted niche through serious homework and persistent due diligence, the better for you. Doing the leg work is worth it. I was lazy in the past, adding months to my learning curve. Using the tools that you shared with us can literally take weeks, months or even years off of your internet marketing learning curve.

    I have yet to dig into your other tools Neil but will certainly take the time to do so now. A wealth of real, usable information here.

    Thanks for sharing your insight with us Neil.

    Ryan

  9. Thanks for sharing such great tools Neil. Never heard about ifttt and ubersuggest. Will check out them now!

  10. Nice article
    Thanks for sharing your insight with us!

  11. Thanks for the tips. It seem to be very effective and simple to apply. I’ll start with Google Insights.

  12. As usual, Neil has come up with very detailed advice. I particularly like his suggestions for Google Insights for Search because you know what people are searching now. A big advantage when creating content for a post. Thanks, Neil.

  13. I’ve only been using market samurai and google keyword tool in my marketing adventures. It sounds like these tools will help me get more specific. Thanks for the suggestions!

  14. Kevin says: 05/13/2012 at 7:48 am

    Great advice. I use Evernote extensively but I didn’t know that I could use it like this. As a beginning content marketer I definitely need to make sure I am creating content that other people want to read. I wish I had read an article like this when I was starting to learn about Internet marketing 6 months ago.

  15. Out of the tools mentioned here, google insights and über suggest can complete all the need. Google insights has the combined power of both google trends and google Adwords keywords tool.

  16. As always, very helpful post from Neil. Never knew you can do so much with Evernote..

  17. Wow Thanks.. I find so many ways and tools that can help me either while work from internet..

  18. I didn’t know about any of those tools, Neil. However I like to use many tools on my Chrome explorer, or even better, many tools on my Smartphone to analyze websites, check statistics and even plan my agenda. Thank you for the post.

  19. Great Post as always Neil,
    these are really useful tools. I love Google Insights a lot, but I have not used the other two. I will give Ubersuggest a try.

  20. Hi,

    Really good article, I have used IIFT, great concept but finding errors in twitter & facebook application, Any suggestion really will be helpful.

  21. Neil you’re everywhere at the moment, another great post.

    Love the endless number of recipes on Ifttt although I’m still waiting for some easier Google+ integration. This is the first I’ve heard of Übersuggest and it looks brilliant, I can straight away see aload of different uses for it.

  22. I just discovered Google Insights the other day. I like that tool. I can do comparisons with it.

  23. Thanks for this great article. Yes as usual nice article. I came from Yoast facebook page, he shared this article on his page.Thanks PB.

  24. marco says: 06/13/2012 at 7:33 pm

    Hi,

    Darren Rowse gives us always great value!
    But why should I set the filter in google insights to worldwide when I promote my sites to USA clients?

    Here I must set USA.

    best wishes
    marco

  25. its the first time i hear about Google insights
    such a very handy tool, thank you so much for letting us know about i

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