What’s your favorite health and fitness blog? If you’re interested in health and fitness, you can likely rattle off a handful of blogs you turn to for daily reading. The online health and fitness community continues to grow in size and influence. Some well-known bloggers or influencers have even become quasi-celebrities.
If you’re a fitness blogger yourself, this can be both an exciting and overwhelming situation. On the plus side, you have the opportunity to grow your blog and your brand to unexpected levels. On the flip side, you’re now battling hundreds of others for eyeballs.
Let’s focus on the opportunity side of the coin, shall we?
One in 20 Google searches are for health-related information.
That’s a lot of searches — and a lot of opportunity. Your health and fitness blog has the chance to be front and center when those searches happen. The hard part is getting that visibility. One of the best ways to boost your search ranking is to offer unique content. Not only will it propel you to the top of the results, but it will help you stand out among your peers.
So, how can you generate unique content when it seems like every fitness issue is covered? Here are a few tips.
Before your start a health and fitness blog, do your research
To know what topics are unique to the health and fitness world, you have to know what your fellow bloggers are already discussing. That’s common sense. While it’s OK to have a general understanding of what those topics are, digging deeper can paint a more accurate — and sometimes surprising — picture.
Try this: Pull together a list of three to five of the most influential health and fitness blogs. Run their blog content through a text analysis tool such as IBM’s Alchemy. Tools like this will analyze text and provide insight around a number of things — in this case, one of the more useful items will be keywords and how frequently they’re used, giving you insight into the most frequently covered topics. From there, you can see where there is room for you to lead the conversation.
Discover the health and fitness topics your audience is actually interested in
If you’re an active blogger in the health and fitness world, you no doubt know the topics and issues relevant to your readers. It can be easy to say, “I know what my audience wants.” But have you really dug into the data to find out what they’re actually interested in reading about? You might be surprised.
Take the time to dig deeper around what your readers are on the hunt for. There are a number of ways to gain insight into this. You can start with your own blog. Does your site have a search button available? Let’s start here. You should be using an analytics platform like Google Analytics (if you’re not, that’s a post for another day). If you are, you’ll be able to see what readers are searching for on your blog. Are there frequent queries for a particular topic you haven’t dedicated much time to? That could signal clear interest but lack of content. (Hello, future post ideas!)
Here are a few tools you can use to your advantage:
Google Analytics
Google Analytics (and similar platforms) also offer the ability to see how people are finding your site via organic search. What phrases or keywords are they typing in? What landing pages are their searches taking them to? Not only does this signify interest in these areas, but it will also alert you to where you’re strongest — and where you’re lacking. If there are particular unique keywords you want to be found for, that’s a hint to start generating more content in that area.
Google Trends
Google Trends is another tool you can use to discover the popularity of certain topics people are searching for. Along with gauging a topic’s popularity, you can use it to spot historical trends. Is there a time of year fitness and health topics spike? Maybe around New Year’s, for example? Using the topics you deem unique, you can use Google Trends to schedule out content when both current and new readers will be most interested.
Social Analytics Tools
If you haven’t caught on yet, the key to a lot of this is data. Data is your friend. Data will help provide the road map to unique content. So the last analytics-related tool I’ll note here is Twitter Analytics.
If you have a solid Twitter following, the analytics platform can reveal characteristics about your audience.
While you know they’re interested in health, maybe you’ll discover that a high percentage of your followers are also homemakers. Perhaps writing some fitness topics geared toward moms would resonate well. Or maybe a high percentage of your followers are vegetarians. Throw in some posts featuring unique vegetarian recipes.
Taken together, these tools are great for spotting unexpected insights and helping guide content creation.
Take a new spin on trending topics
When a trend pops up, bloggers often pounce on it. That’s not a bad strategy, but it can be hard to win the war of clicks when everyone is already talking about the same thing. Are there subtopics you can focus on that offer a unique take? Social analytics tools can offer insights into additional hashtags and keywords within a popular topic. This can give you some potential ideas to dive into, allowing you to take advantage of a trend without rehashing what’s already out there.
Creating unique content is no easy feat when there are hundreds of fellow bloggers writing about the same industry. But with the right tools and analysis, you can dig deeper into your own data and your own audience to find opportunities to present fresh takes and work your way to the top of the rankings.
