Oh the daunting blank page. As content writers we all have those moments when in spite of a good idea knocking around in our heads, we can’t seem to get it out on the page. We all need that extra kick of inspiration from time to time.

But where to find the inspired ideas that will resonate with your prospective audience and drive business results?

Consider the full depth and breadth of keyword research.

When it comes to keyword driven content, it’s not just about the words that lead a user to a page of content on your site. It’s about the meaning and intent of the search. What was that user really trying to find? What problem do they need to solve?

Keyword research is all about semantics. Search engines understand meaning. “Keyword,” “term,” “query,” all refer to the text typed or spoken into the search field. The fact that people are verbally searching is very important, but we will get to that particular point in a moment.

Search engines have been crawling written human language for over 35 years. Not one particular language, but practically every written form of communication on the planet. That is a great deal of pattern recognition that applies no matter what particular language in which the text is written. Keywords date back to when all a search engine could do was match words entered for words found.

Semantic sophistication means that we have to communicate (create content) in a way that is meaningful.

Search engines are capable of scoring the quality of the content they crawl based on the more nuanced aspects of language just as your intended human audience does. That level of quality and communication requires far more investment in time, creativity, and skill than merely putting the right sets of words on the page.

This semantic approach to keywords informs not only long form content like a blog post, but product/service descriptions, social media posts, and photo/video file names and descriptions. The answers people are looking for can be expressed and solved in a variety of ways.

Advances in technology now enable us to skip typing terms all together and verbally ask the “computer” for what we want to know. Isn’t it amazing how very much more our lives look like Star Trek now? The point is that we are interacting with search more and more like we interact and communicate with each other. We do not use the same words and phrases when we verbally search as we use when quickly typing in a query.

Verbal search isn’t simply a convenience for human users.

This is the next step in teaching the search engine intelligence how we use spoken language. Combine all these verbal searches with the lifetimes of spoken language in video and podcasts and there’s already a wealth of patterns for the engines to learn from. With the way we are now digitally sharing images, search engines will eventually discover the patterns that convey meaning in the visual without words.

Example?

So how does all of this apply to the practical every day of our marketing efforts? Take this article for example. The keywords we hoped to use – keyword research, search engine optimization, SEO, content strategy – were just the start of the process. Do you see, we have communicated those concepts and more by using the full breadth and richness of language?

Rather than give you a quick set of bullet points that satisfy the need to get the right words on the page, we are taking the basic concepts and delving much deeper into the whys and wherefores that will enable you to take the following action items and craft content better suited to the needs of your audience.

Actionable

Putting these thoughts into practice will work itself out in several different ways.

Do you need to climb in rankings for a valued key term?

Dig into what specific pages get traffic for that term, and read through them with fresh eyes. Does the content need to be updated with fresh information? Maybe the page could use better images or video to help explain the concept or solution the page was intended to address. Also, check into what higher ranking pages are accomplishing for that term. Is there a bigger concept or a nuanced meaning that your content has missed? Now you’ve got a few directions that could spark some fresh thinking and creativity for those frequently covered terms.

Are there keywords that bring you bonus traffic?

As we dig into keyword research, we are likely to come across terms that our customers have considered but we have not. What content can we create to better address the intent that the low hanging fruit of related terms already sends our way? Consider also how traffic driving terms related not only to your core queries, but also to other terms Google, Bing, or Yahoo might suggest as a user is typing. Stepping back a bit to take in the broader landscape of your favorite topics can help will all kinds of ideation.

What about those breadcrumb trails?

Where did a user go after the first landing page? Consider how subsequent pages and blog posts relate to the original search query. Often users have a specific bit of information they are looking for or a specific problem they are trying to solve but their frame of reference doesn’t include the same terms you might be accustomed to using. Sometimes laymen’s terms don’t quite fully express what a user is really looking for. Consider expressing the same concepts without the jargon or insider industry terms, or rewriting to better define the useful specificity to someone unfamiliar with the industry language.

Also, natural curiosity might clue you into fresh content based on the relationships of page to page navigation and on site search. For instance, how might this blog post on content creation lead to our post about social media contests? What problem might combining these two very different ideas solve for a member of our community? That kind of thinking can lead to all kinds of interesting content.

It’s no longer enough to create lists of obvious keywords and possible variations. To create the best content to serve your customers and community, you need to consider the deeper meanings of those terms, the possible variations of intent inherent to those queries, and how those ideas relate to other ideas. Content is king, and he has a very keen intellect.