In your quest to provide your website visitors with content that informs, builds brand loyalty, and inspires them to take your desired action, picking relevant topics is essential. Question research is a tool that can improve your content by allowing you to identify and answer the most important questions to your audience. In this post, we’ll examine how you can identify and build content around questions people are asking in your niche.
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What is Question Research?
Question research is a method of finding out what questions your prospective and existing customers are asking that can help you create content that addresses those questions. The end goal of question research is to bring people posing those questions through your sales process or funnel to ultimately do business with you.
Someone that is asking a question is showing interest. Producing content that addresses your audience’s questions shows your subject matter expertise and satisfies your audience’s need for more information. It’s a win-win.
Identifying Questions Important to Your Audience
Using question research to improve your content is an excellent strategy, but where can you find those questions? Here are some methods for finding out what people in your niche are asking.
Google’s “People Also Ask” Feature
When you use Google to ask a question or find information, you’ll notice that about a third of the way down the page is an area labeled “People also ask.” This can be a goldmine for discovering what people are asking about a topic related to your niche.
For example, a Google search for “Italian restaurants near me” displayed in “People also ask” the question “What is healthy to order in an Italian restaurant?” Answering with a blog topic could be a great way to drive traffic to your site and engage with your audience.
Social Media
Social media can be a great place to discover the questions and topics most important to your audience. What are your customers asking on your Facebook page? What hashtags are trending in your niche? What questions are people asking your competitors the most often? All of these can be great sources to drive your topic ideation.
Forums
Many people go to online forums to ask questions, which often yields the clues you’re looking for to produce better content. Many forums are built around a given niche. To help you identify important questions and better engage with your audience, browse forums in your niche and look for the most active threads. Better yet, try to find questions that don’t yet have a reliable answer. If you can produce a high quality independently researched piece to provide the answer, your audience will thank you. You may even consider posting to the forum with the relevant link to your blog.
Your Sales/Customer Service Teams
As they interact with your customers daily, your sales force and customer service representatives are a great way to identify the most important questions in your niche. Your salespeople and CSRs are asked questions just about every time they interact with customers and during sales calls.
“How do I choose between product X and product Y?” Or, “How can I troubleshoot X.” Or, “Can I use X to do X?” Questions like these tell you not only what the market is looking for, but they also tell you what new content can be valuable to add to your site.
Perform Keyword Research
Performing keyword research can be one of the easiest ways to identify important questions in your niche. Tools like SEMRush and Moz will allow you to enter a seed keyword then filter results by Questions. For instance, if your niche is soccer equipment, you might start with a broad keyword like “Soccer”, then sort by Questions. From there, you might discover that a lot of search volume for people asking questions like “What gear do I need for soccer?”, “Do I need shin guards for soccer?”, “How do I get better at soccer?” To capture this traffic, you could build out quality blog posts answering these questions.
When identifying questions through the other methods above, performing keyword research is also a good idea. For instance, if you find that a lot of people are asking about something on your social media platforms, plug that questions into your keyword research tool. Performing keyword research can also help you determine the value of producing a topic on a given piece from an organic search perspective while identifying the best keywords to target in your content.
Get Help with Your Content Marketing
Need help with your content marketing campaigns? At ClickGiant, we develop custom content that ranks and gets clicks, improves your brand’s exposure online, increases quality traffic to your site, and converts visitors into customers. Contact us today to learn more.
