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Key Takeaways
Choose proven topics, not ideas that just sound good in your head: Clients pitch topics guests occasionally ask about, then the research shows nobody searches for them. Start in a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush and validate real demand first. A proven topic is the overlap of two circles: what people actually search for, and what your specific audience cares about.
If you can’t serve the searcher, the keyword isn’t for you: One client’s writer pitched pet-friendly beach content — but only two of his 200 condos allow pets, and those book up without help. Campground keywords are the same trap: you’re promoting an alternative to your own product. Leave those topics to the manager down the street with 25 pet-friendly houses.
Some keywords rank well and still send you nothing: You won’t outrank weather.com, and Google answers weather searches right on the results page anyway. Conrad watched a whole series of best-time-to-visit posts rank second or third and still pull a garbage click-through rate, because Google scrapes the answer into the SERP. Check what the results page gives away for free before you invest.
Read the SERP before anyone writes a word: Click all ten top results and find the pattern — listicles, directories, a map on every page. One modifier changes everything: ’hotels in San Francisco’ returns OTAs, ’best hotels in San Francisco’ returns blog-style guides. Hand a talented writer the wrong page type and you’re forcing a square peg into a round hole.
For restaurant-style topics, comprehensive directories win, not top-five lists: Search ’restaurants in Myrtle Beach’ and what ranks is long, directory-style coverage of nearly every sit-down spot in town — not five picks with two sentences each. Skip the fast food, weight your favorites at the top, but list everything. Thin listicles simply don’t rank for this kind of search.
Covering a topic in full has nothing to do with word count: You could write 3,000 words about the cheese on one restaurant’s pizza and rank for nothing. Conrad’s team runs every piece through ClearScope, which scrapes the top 30 ranking pages and lists the subtopics and terms they all cover — a checklist that catches weak content hiding behind an impressive word count.
Paying writers by the word buys you fluff: Per-word pay incentivizes over-explaining, so you end up policing padding instead of publishing. Flip the assignment: hand the writer a specific list of subtopics and terms from your research and ask them to cover the topic properly. You’ll pay for coverage instead of volume.
Build topic clusters, not a pile of one-off posts: Start with two or three core topics, build pillar pages, then support each with subtopic pieces that link back. Readers click deeper, engagement improves, and Google gets a clearer signal that you’re the area expert rather than a site full of scattered articles.
Match the angle to the intent, not just the format: SEMrush labels keywords informational, commercial, or transactional — use that to decide whether a piece should educate, entertain, or sell. Most blog topics lean informational, but knowing the label upfront shapes the depth and the edge you write with, one level beyond picking listicle versus directory.
What We Cover In This Episode
Part one of a two-part series on doing SEO content the right way. Conrad and Paul walk through picking proven topics that match guests you can actually serve, reading the search results page to choose the right page type, and covering topics comprehensively with tools like ClearScope instead of chasing word count.
