Comprehensive Guide On How To Do Content Research In 2022

Everyone hates it when each time the resources, energy, and creativity put to write content fails out. 

In the current scenario, the competition for attention on the internet is quite frustrating for almost every niche that changes the value of effective content. 

Let me show you this in numbers, a study run by BuzzSumo in 2018 told us that 50% of all the content that goes on-air fails i.e, it doesn’t get even 4 shares and not one backlink. 

That is quite demotivating for writers out there. But but but, before thinking of giving up and changing the profession, know what makes a content fail. 

One of the biggest reasons for failing or less performing content is poor content research. 

Yup, here it is.

The future of your content starts to form before you even write a word of it. 

Almost every content marketer/writer knows, if your research went well, you know the content’s gonna be great. As content research is a part of content marketing strategy.

So on today’s journey, we’ll go to different lands to know the basics and needs of content research, best content research tools. And we’ll cover how to do content research and some effective tips. 

So, Hop on mate! Let’s uncover the world. 

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Station 1: Content Research Basics

What makes content effective? 

Trust, Authority, and Influence.

The trio can make your content stand out from the crowd. 

And we’ll look up to the tips and tricks to generate all these qualities in your content. 

What is included in content research? 

If I’m gonna list out there could be more than 50 things to consider while doing content research, but I know you will get bored with that. 

So, I’m gonna list out some of the most important and basic researches that have to be done while writing content and we will cover these with others in brief on the next stations. 

The most important researches to carry out before writing content includes:

• Looking constantly on content volume and trends related to your industry
• Identifying the content that users share the most
• Finding the keywords for the topic you chose
• Finding the best and reliable info and data on the chosen topic

5 Components Of A Reliable Content

It’s critical to examine every source you’re interested in using the 5 components of reliable internet content, regardless of the topic you’re exploring.

The following are the five elements:

• Insight: Does the article or blog make you consider simple ideas in a new light?
• Simplicity: The content should give all of the information in an easy-to-understand manner.
• Detail: Great sources have the level of depth required to effectively cover a topic, in addition to being simply written.
• Breadth: Breadth is the range an article or blog covers the related topics and important questions in content. 
• Relevance: The info you found and the content you are writing must be highly relevant to ensure that you don’t fall off the path. 

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Station 2: Content Research Tools

No content research can exist without effective and trustworthy content marketing research tools. Now we’ll discuss some of the best content research tools that we use and recommend to everyone. 

BuzzSumo

One of the best content research tools in the industry. It makes competitive research quite simple. All you have to do is just enter a keyword and BuzzSumo will show you all the top content that gets the most number of shares on social media platforms in seconds. You can then read and analyze those articles to find out the key factor in them.

MozBar extension

MozBar Extension is one of the best free content research tools available. It works as a chrome extension. MozBar basically analyzes the authority of a website. It makes measuring the technical elements of a website easy and fast. 

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is basically all about keywords. Ubersuggest is a one-stop solution for keyword research. You just have to put a term and it will show you all the keywords around it with enough data about them like volume and competition. There’s a limit of the number of searches in a day for free users, also some of the features of Ubersuggest are only available to paid plans. 

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog offers a free website crawling tool. It can be very helpful for SEO Audit and finding keywords on a webpage. You can run your competitor’s website link to find out the major keywords they are ranking for.  

Google Adwords Keyword Planner

It was supposed to be the first step of keyword research once but now with time, it has lost its essence. But that doesn’t mean you can miss it out, your research can’t be complete without it. 

LSI Graph

LSI is the short form of latent semantic indexing. LSI graph tool is highly useful to find related keywords/topics to a term. 

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Station 3: How to Do Content Research? (Tips) 

1) Find Your Industry Related Content’s Volume And Trends

Before starting the process of content creation, you must look out the whole picture. You must know the volume of your industry-related content getting published in a month or a week. And the average performance of these articles in terms of social shares and others. 

The best content research tool to achieve that is BuzzSumo. You can go to the Analysis tab in the Content analyzer section and simply put in the topic. BuzzSumo will create a quick report depicting how many articles are getting published in a period of time and their average performance. 

You can change the course of the report from monthly to weekly to get the latest picture. 

2) Social Media Shares

Sharing is a crucial factor to look up to because if people share your content with others your traffic can be increased by more than 40%. Again I’ll recommend BuzzSumo for the task. It offers a free feature to look up to the content that is most shared on social media. 

You just have to put up a term:

Then, see the most-shared content:

3) Use Related Searches

You must have seen the “Related Searches” suggestions at the bottom of a SERP. You can consider them too to look out what people are searching for related to your term. 

The most important help that you can get from it is the intent of people. You can find out whether people are looking for jobs in a related field or if people want a pdf around the topic, these searches can provide you with some considerable subtopics that you can cover in your content. 

4) Find Out Your Competitor’s Strengths

Knowing what are your competitor’s most successful content pages can help you mould your own content strategy. Just as we discussed in the first tip, you can use the BuzzSumo tool to analyze content by its Content Analyzer feature. 

You can put up to 10 domains of your competitors and analyze their most effective content with their headlines, metadata, content lengths, and networks all at once which saves a lot of time. 

5) Autocomplete Suggestions

Autocomplete suggestions can be very as they show the exact data that people have been searching related to the term you entered. The best content research tool for this is Ubersuggest, as it’s free and generates a quick list of autocomplete suggestions based on the main term (keyword) that you’ll enter. 

The feature can help in many ways including:

• Find better topics than you searched for. 
• Listing subtopics and important points that people have been searching for. 
• Get ideas of content that you can write next. 

6 ) Steal Competitor’s Keywords

The one free content research tool I’ll recommend for this is Screaming Frog. It is a free website crawler that’s great for SEO audits and various technical tasks. It’s also handy for figuring out what keywords your competitors are targeting.

Free download of Screaming Frog:

Then, enter the URL of a competitor’s website and press Start:

Following that, you’ll see a report with a long list of URLs from the domain you crawled. Examine them, paying special attention to the URL slugs:

Scanning a website’s URLs can usually tell you what subjects and keywords the domain is focusing on. 

This can provide you with a multitude of ideas for:

• Topics that are relevant to your own material.
• Keywords that should be included in the material.
• Ideas of content that can come into use in the future. 

7 ) Get Other’s Research Reports

Why should you rely entirely on your own research when you may benefit from the work of others? Obtaining research papers can provide you with valuable insights into topics you might not have considered before, and also keep you informed about what’s next in your sector.

Here are a few resources for finding related research reports:

Search for [your industry] + [research report] on Google. This can soon provide some easy and good results. 

Use reports from Forrester Research. They are one of the world’s leading research businesses, providing a huge number of research studies on a wide range of topics and industries. What’s the disadvantage? The prices are high. However, if your company can afford them, they may be well worth the expense.

8 ) Read Other’s Content

This is a lot simpler suggestion, but it’s one that’s difficult to ignore. Keep an eye on what other businesses in your field are publishing. This method will allow you to collect a lot of information without you realizing it.

9 ) Read Your Industry’s News Sources

Whatever field you work in, there are likely a number of media sources that cover it. Apart from blogs, you can rely on other news sources too where journalists report on stories. 

Make them a part of your daily news diet by subscribing to their email newsletters. This will keep you informed and make researching much simpler for you.

Do you believe your field is too dull for anyone to want to write about it? You could be pleasantly surprised. Use Google to identify relevant blogs and publications to start. 

10 ) Use Quora

What easier way to check out what people’s questions are than a website meant to address other people’s inquiries? Look through Quora (registration required) to see if there are any queries about your business or content creation.

11 ) Examine Your Past Content And Follow What Works

You don’t necessarily have to start from scratch every time when it comes to content. Implementing further what you know works is always the greatest option.

One of the best options to do that is to go to Google Analytics. Then, under the left-hand navigation, go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages:

Then, scroll down to see which URLs are the most effective:

12 ) Take Use of Reddit

For a content marketing research, Reddit can a fantastic tool. It’s excellent for determining what kinds of queries your audience has, similar to Quora.

All you have to do is type in a subreddit that is related to your industry and just scroll. Look out for all the questions that people have and issues that they are facing and try to solve them out. 

13 ) Working For Someone Else? Collect Every Info On Them That You Can

If you are freelancing for a company, you’ve probably already done your homework and gotten to know your customer. However, it’s worth considering whether you’ve gone as deep as you potentially can into your background check. Here are some suggestions about where to begin:

They have a webpage. Go over as much of their content as you can. This could take a long time for huge sites or historic brands. However, the more connected you are with their company, the great the content you create will be.

Their domains that connect. Take the time to browse through site content that ties back to your client. This can lead to some fascinating insights regarding their company and products.

14)  Trust The Top Results

Do you realize how smart Google is these days?

When Google ranks pages, it provides a higher priority to the most reliable pages on a given topic in the SERPs. As a result, it’s probable that if you go deeper into the succeeding pages of a search result, you’ll come across low-quality information or content that lacks enough E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness).

Consider entering a different query if you can’t discover enough results for your current query. But you have to trust that the ones ranking on top ain’t for no reason, they earned that and you can freely rely on them for your content research. 

15) Rely On Best Sources

If you write frequently, you’ve probably created a list of reliable data sources that you use frequently. Those sources, on the top of being significant names in the business, have entire research teams working on their content, which means the facts you discover on their sites have most likely been double-checked before publishing.

This instantly raises these sites beyond a personal blog authored by someone who doesn’t have to go through extensive fact-checking before publishing a piece.

As a result, the information provided by large, well-established corporations is often considerably more reliable than that provided by independent writers. With this in mind, it’s a good idea to put together a list of reliable sources that you can read at a later period.

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Conclusion

Content Research is overlooked a lot of times but it is crucial to ensure that the very first step of the content creation goes well so that the laid foundation stays solid. The content marketing research tools and tips that we covered above are surely quite enough to make your content creation journey go safe and sound.

We hope that you’ve found all the answers that you were looking for but if you still have any queries left, the comment box is wide open or you can mail us at [email protected] We will be more than happy to help you. 

Thank You For Reading Along.