Last time we’ve discussed the importance of optimizing content for Humans, because even though some of the visitors you’ll get come from search engines, it’s Humans that you ultimately wish to engage with your content. They are the ones who you want seeing you as an expert, buying products or services from you and so on.

That’s why I started showing you how to begin optimizing for Humans. If you didn’t manage to get last week’s lesson (Lesson 2), then here’s the link:

http://www.squirrly.co/for-humans-content-vs-seo-content

The mindset here is important, because we’re no longer focusing on how to find data that’s helpful for search engine crawlers and we don’t want to make the content look good just for search engines. We care about the Human readers that we eventually bring to the blog, through search engines.

Also, doing this optimizing for Humans thing right will help us get more social love (social signals) and links to our articles, because people like to share the things that appeal to them. So the whole point of optimizing your content for Humans is to make it as appealing as possible for Humans, by performing simple actions.

We started with: Researching Your Topic: Identifying your profitable topic. I showed you how to identify your profitable topic by using Squirrly’s Keyword Research and Analysis tool.

Today, I’ll show you how to find the best topics that you can target for Humans, by only manual means, no Squirrly at all. Also, there will be some actionable work files to help you along and manage all of this better.

What we’re looking for is:

1) Finding the topic, or to be more accurate: the name of the topic, in such way that Humans will easily identify with it and get the feeling that it’s what they were interested in all along.

2) Make sure they discuss your topic, because that shows that it’s amazingly important to them.

3) Make sure that the topic is so great that Humans already search for articles regarding it. A lot.

Remember: keywords (or keyphrases for that matter) are topics. Think of them as topics and it will be much easier to make sense of all that follows.

1. Ensure you get the right name for your Topic

This is very important since you want your topic to be profitable. You have to make sure that you write the more general topic you want to write about in such way that Humans will feel a connection to it. You don’t want to use some bizarre words that your audience just doesn’t use, or never thinks about.

The first thing I always suggest is to try and get a broad perspective into the possible ways in which you can approach the more general topic. Because of the way in which our brain works, we normally think of about 5 ideas, and we don’t go any further with thinking deeper.

Just think about this: the reason brain storming works is the fact that when you brainstorm you don’t care if an idea is good or stupid, you just write it down and try to come up with as many variations as possible. I’ve even heard that the guys from Upworthy.com have to write at least 25 headline ideas for every single article they plan to publish.

Doing such an exercise will help you think about your topic with an open mind and will get you closer to that winning, profitable topic.

I did promise you that I won’t use Squirrly to help solve any of the points from today’s lesson, but that doesn’t mean I won’t show you a cool tool (not made by any of us) that does what I’ve just described earlier for you.

It’s a speedhack for this part of the Lesson, otherwise it could take you a really long time to come up with about 40 ideas on how to approach your topic.

Go to Ubersuggest:

There, you will see that you can input some keywords, and Ubersuggest will display you a (most probably huge) list of keyword or topic ideas. Wait there’s more: these are topics that people actually search for across Google, Yahoo, Bing, so they are of interest.

Write all of them down in an excel sheet. You have one attached here:

http://www.squirrly.co/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/uber-topic-research.xlsx

On the first column you’ll see an example that we did for: „cooking recipes” (we searched for “cooking recipes” in Ubersuggest and we got the list)

Mark with green the items that you think are going to win and that really sound like something you’d write about (and people would like to read).

Mark with yellow the ones that could be good (maybe also think of using them for other blog posts, later on)

Mark with black the ones that you’ll always ignore and never use, because they either seem like nonsense, or you just don’t want to cover.

Great!

Now you have a list of possible names for your topic, that humans relate to, search for and want to read more about.

Just as a side note, even though it doesn’t seem like it, when you use the Keyword Research tool from Squirrly, Squirrly does all this in the background, while you wait for the results. We managed to optimize it so that it works real fast and saves you time.

2. Making sure that Humans discuss your topic.

How to see if the topic you plan to write about is discussed on Twitter

This is a bit of a tricky part, because Twitter itself sometimes has problems loading all twitter search results in the Search tab you find in Twitter, so you can falsely believe that Humans don’t talk about your subject.

I suggest that you go ahead and install Tweetdeck (if you haven’t already done this). The Chrome app from Tweetdeck is really powerful and it will help you with your twitter marketing as well.

But here’s how to use Tweetdeck (btw, it’s part of Twitter now) in order to find out if people discuss about your topic:

• click the search icon in the left menu
• type in one of the topic ideas you marked with green in the previous step.
• hit enter
• click Add Column

Awesome. You now have your first column that you can monitor, in order to see if people actively discuss about your topic.

Repeat this process for all the other topic ideas that you had.

Now how do you manually analyze all of this?

First of all (not 100% recommended by me), you can scroll down in each column and see how many messages with your keyword there are. You will be able to figure out if one topic idea has more written messages about it than the other ones.  Of course, it’s not fully recommended, because the twitter search might have temporary issues, and it will not display all results for any given topic.

 

Second (this is a lot better and a lot more valuable): look how fast new tweets come into each column. The one with the biggest frequency of new incoming tweets is your winning topic idea, because it shows how actively people are discussing about it. Since you’ll be witnessing this Live, it will give you a good opinion about which topic would perform better and is more popular.

 

Third, (and quite final) see how many of the results have your keyword exactly like you thought of writing it. If people keep writing it different in the feeds, maybe you should start refering to your topic as they do, because it means that that’s what your Human audience wants. And we do optimize content for humans in this lesson.

Good. Now you know that Humans who use twitter discuss about your topic, so it means that it’s important to them and that it will make sense for you to optimize for this topic.

But Twitter is not all of the internet, and it’s always good to see how people discuss your topic on forums as well.

Monitoring discussions related to your topic on forums

Go to Google. Type in one of your topic ideas. For example: you could type in „cooking recipes for dinner”, because that’s what you’d want to write about.

The usual list of Google results appears. But now you have a menu with Web, Images, etc.

Click: More -> Discussions

Look at how many results there are for this keyword in the Discussions section.

There are: 494,000 results (at the time I’m writing this lesson). And if you look at the results, you will see that they are indeed related to your topic, and also discussed on many forums and blogs, which is just what you wanted.

But wouldn’t you get a bigger Moola Moola (yes, the awful slang for money is back.. You missed it so far, right?) potential, if you’d write about „cooking recipes for kids”?

I don’t know. Let’s see. I just checked Discussion for „cooking recipes for kids”, and it seems there are 992,000 results. Smells like more Moola Moola to me, so we need to keep this in mind because it might be more profitable to write about it, since humans are genuinely interested in this kind of thing.

Note: not all are 100% relevant, that’s why we’ll cross-reference it somehow with what we’ve already analyzed on Twitter.

Another great idea is to also use the Search Tools section, and switch from „Any Time” to „last month”, „last year”, something like that, to make sure it’s still something that Humans talk about these days, not just like in 2006 or last year.

Time for the big ’ol Facebook to help us in our quest

As usual, this is just an example, but I’d like to follow in the line of „cooking recipes”.

Thanks to the Open Graph it’s really cool to see which people like which topics. Of course, this is definitely not the absolute popularity of a certain topic, but it may help you along with what you’ve learned from Twitter and Google Discussions.

The new search box from Facebook just got a lot better, so use it by entering there the topics you’ve marked with green in one of your earlier steps.

You can see the number of likes for each topic, and they display it with a number of people who like certain related topics.

Also, if you know that your Facebook audience is targeted and you want to feed them new cool topics, to bring in more popularity and moola moola, you can search for „friends who like cooking recipes”, or something like that. This will help you figure out which of the topics you thought about are of real interest among your audience.

Whew.. We finally managed to see what topics are most discussed by Humans. Very important, if you want your articles to matter to people. If you’re writing about a topic that no one talks about, it’ll most probably end up boring and obscure, no matter how seo you made your seo content.

Most certainly, this was a lot more work than just looking at the topic name results from Squirrly’s Keyword Research Tool and getting the social intelligence from it saying: “yes, this topic is popular”, “no, people don’t really talk about this”.

3. Find that one topic name that is so great Humans already search for articles regarding it. Like, a lot.

Google don’t have their Keyword Research Tool anymore, so we’re going to use their Keyword Planner tool for this one.

– Go to Google Keyword Planner Tool
– Click „Search for keyword and ad group ideas”
– input your keywords (topic ideas, the ones you marked green) into the first box.
– click „Get Ideas”
– go to the Keyword Ideas tab, not the Ad group ideas.

There’s one thing I must warn you about: this will not help you find the number of Humans who search for your topic, written Exactly as you wrote it. If you remember from the last lesson, that is incredibly important when it comes to optimizing your content for Humans.

Lesson over 🙂

Now you know how to start optimizing for Humans, by finding topics that Humans are genuinely interested in. These are the topics that are prone to bring in some profit for you, and make those Humans share your articles with other Humans, making you more popular and more moola, moola (comment below if you like this slang .. I may perhaps be getting too fond of it)

Great! Now you have your topics. Fiddle with these two lessons for a bit longer today and tomorrow.

After that, we’re going to get into writing content for Humans and optimizing it, so that Humans will genuinely like to read your stuff, share it and come back for more.

Keep practicing with this. See you in class this Friday.