How to Conduct Research for SEO Articles
How to get data for your subheadings and paragraphs
One thing I’ve noticed is that most people are terrible at conducting research. This is likely due to our terrible educational system that teaches you to write boring articles and then cover your ass with an exhaustive list of “sources”.
The academic approach isn’t going to cut it when writing content on the internet. In today’s article, I teach you how to “find the value” when researching so you can give your readers exactly what they’re looking for.
Researching subheadings
It’s important to remember that Google can’t read your content the way your readers can.
A human’s eyes slowly scan your content line-by-line from left to right. The person registers various emotions ranging from mild interest to rage to annoyance (or most frequently, boredom).
And that’s if the person is really interested in what you’re writing. In reality, their eyes jump around on the page in a frantic attempt to find the value. This is why I recommend writing in the Inverted Pyramid style so the reader can see the value immediately and calm down enough to take the action you want them to take.
Googlebot is different.
It doesn’t read anything. It doesn’t feel any emotions when scanning your content. It’s not human.
The bot is trained by Google’s secret algorithm to look for certain elements on key portions of your webpage. One of the most important of those are your subheadings.
It’s important to base the content in your subheadings off of the subheadings that Google already is showing you they want. There are a few free tools that will do this for you.
I personally use a free browser extension called SEO Minion (Chrome/Firefox) to get subheading data for my articles.
How to use SEO Minion to obtain subheadings
First, enter your keyword into Google.
Next, open up the top 3 search results in a new tab. These are the sites that you’re going to get your subheading data from.
Using the top 3 results is a general rule that’ll work in the vast majority of situations. But there are some times when the Top 3 Rule doesn’t apply.