There’s no doubt that blogging helps companies generate brand awareness and increase inbound leads. According to HubSpot, 92% of companies who blog have acquired new customers through their blog, and B2B marketers who use blogs generate 67% more leads than those that do not.

However, brainstorming topics and writing blog posts can be challenging for companies who are new to blogging. In a previous blog post, we listed quick ways to come up with relevant ideas for B2B blogs. However, once you’ve brainstormed a full page of ideas, how do you actually know which ones your potential customers want to read about? Is there a way to confirm what people are interested in before you dedicate a few hours to writing?

Using Google to See People’s Interests

Google’s Keyword Planner is a free tool to help Google advertisers set up their campaigns and determine which keywords to bid for. However, the information from this tool can also be used to help generate blog post ideas based on search volumes of keywords. Below are the 3 steps to use the Keyword Planner for this purpose.

1. Brainstorm topics related to your business

Think of topics related to the products that your company offers, and problems or services your target customers are interested in. For example, since we work with startups and growing companies on their sales and marketing, “startup marketing”, “startup sales”, and “sales strategy for startups” are relevant keywords.

2. Enter the phrases into Google Keyword Planner

Google’s Keyword Planner will tell you right away if people search for those exact phrases and how often per month. It even displays related keywords and their search volumes as well. We can now use the search volumes to gauge how interested people are in that topic.

3. Use the results to find blog topics people care about

In this case, it turns out there are only 20 searches/month in the entire world on Google for “sales strategy for startups”, compared to 880 for “startup marketing.” Good thing we checked before we spent 4 hours writing a blog post about sales strategy for startups!

As you go through the list of related keywords, you should find there are lots of ideas for potential blog posts. In our example, we see that there thousands of searches related to “small business marketing” and “small business marketing ideas”.

Using Google Keyword Planner, we now have a better idea of what people are looking for online and even how often. This information can help you prioritize the blog topics you’re writing about. Writing your blog post about a topic that’s searched more frequently doesn’t guarantee it’ll show up on the top search results, but at least you have a quantitative confirmation that it’s a relevant topic.

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