How SaaS blogs can select content topics for their SEO goals and business objectives

It’s been a few years now that content has been the reigning king of Internet land. It’s an essential tool to help SaaS brands attract potential customers, establish thought leadership, and create brand awareness. But with so much content published online daily and now with technologies like ChatGPT, there is no shortage of mediocre content online.****

The most likely causes are:

• Little time and resources available for content creation
• Lack of knowledge
• Not high enough importance assigned internally
• No testing and reviewing performance
• Old-school SEO tactics

I totally get how time-consuming and costly good content creation can be, so you cannot blame businesses for looking for faster and more affordable ways to create it.

ChatGPT, Jasper AI, Notion AI and Google’s new Bard, can certainly help to make content production faster, but the technologies aren’t perfect yet.

Tip: To save time with your content production, figure out how AI tools can help you with your existing process or where they can be used while your content team moves to editing and fact-checking tasks.

Before you create your content, you need to come up with good SaaS blog topics, that will be memorable, resonate with people, and stand a chance to rank in search engines. The AI tools will not be able to give you the best blog topics, yet. I explain how you can use AI tools below.

5 tactics to select better blog topics for your saas website (and what to avoid):

1. Tap into your client service data.

Your client service team can have some valuable insights for you. Ask for a list of common questions or remarks from your customers. This information makes it easy to come up with educational and how-to blog post ideas that will appeal to your target audience and help your current customers as well. These are great to share in your newsletters too.

2. Define what topics you want to be associated with and if there is a clear connection between these topics and your software.

Don’t choose blog topics simply for the purpose of selling your product. Blog content should be relatable to the people who use or want to use your product. To make your blog topics relatable, you have to understand your target audience’s problems and needs and explain how your software helps with those problems.

Don’t use AI to generate topics for your blog. Rather, ask it to list common problems or challenges that your target audience faces, and then use that as inspiration to come up with your own blog topic.

3. Do not go for broad content topics because Notion is doing so.

There are many large SaaS brands that create the “Best [insert topic] that you can use in 2023 ” posts.

An important thing to understand here is that such brands’ search volume, authority, and website are so popular that they can rank well in search engines for very broad or unrefined topics. Unfair, yes, but this is how it works.

What ends up happening is that people see that these brands rank for this type of content, and they proceed to create their own version of the same thing. So you end up saying something completely generic that the search engines already have collected about the topic.

If you aren’t such a big brand, you should spend time refining your blog topic by adding more detail and making it more specific. For example: instead of choosing a broad title like “How SaaS brands can pick better topics for their blogs” you can make it “How smaller SaaS brands can pick better topics for their blogs” or “How to choose blog topics if you are a new business in a competitive industry”.

4. Use PPA data

You can make use of Google’s People Also Ask data, but take it a step further.

Type a broader search term (we call these “seed keywords”) into Google Search and review the questions that pop up under the People Also Ask accordion. If you like a particular question, you can click on it. It will expand. More related questions will pop up on the list.

You can use the questions in this list as a QA (question and answer) blog post topic. You can either use 1 question as the topic for the whole post or select multiple questions that are closely related and then form an overarching topic around it as your blog topic.

5. Gather insights from your keyword data.

Don’t select a keyword from your keyword list to create an article about. Rather, take a step back and look for common topics and trends within the keyword data. For example, if you see that there are many terms that are about the same thing, maybe just rephrased, you could create a blog post or guide on the overall topic. Given that you ensure that the various keywords are used in specific paragraphs within the copy.

Best SEO based on your budget:

If you have a large budget, you can create more content and experiment more. In this case, you can afford (pun intended) to throw something at the wall and see what sticks. You can then double down on what works and resonates with your audience.

If you have a smaller budget you should rather opt for selecting evergreen blog topics that you can create long-form posts with. Posting five blog posts of 2000+ words with very specific topics will be more valuable than 100 blog posts of 600 words each that target broader topics.

Here’s a checklist for evaluating blog topics::

• What blog topics do you want to associate with your brand?
• Are you already an authority on some of these topics?
• If you have blog content already, which posts get the most traffic?
• Get the most engagement?
• Get both the most traffic and engagement?
• Which blog topics lead to conversions?
• When you type the blog topic into Google, what brands are ranking in the top organic search results? Can you compete with these brands?
• Does the topic address your target audience’s pain points, needs, and interests?
• Does the topic offer a unique perspective on industry trends or news?
• Does the topic address common customer questions or concerns?
• Does the topic offer solutions to challenges faced by your customers?
• Are there high-traffic keywords related to the topic that you can incorporate into your content?
• Is the topic visually appealing and easy to read?
• Does the topic fit with the overall goals and messaging of your brand?
• Does the topic align with your SEO and content marketing strategies?

By considering these factors, you can choose better blog topics that resonate with your audience and help you achieve your business goals.

Listen to an episode of saas.unbound with Geoff Roberts @Outseta where he shares how the blog has been helping the business acquire users and