Traditional Way & Ahrefs’ Way

Then, we can generate even more keyword ideas by using other modifier keywords that signal educational intent. Here are some of these words: how, guide, resource, ideas, tips, etc.

Last but not least, Ahrefs has a separate report for all of the questions related to a given topic that people type in Google, and it’s just one click away from the report we’ve been using so far.

Analyze competitors

One way to draw inspiration from your competitors is to manually check their websites for topic ideas. That’s a lot of man-hours.

Here’s how you can streamline this process with Ahrefs.

First of all, start by listing your competitors and doing basic market research. You can always double-check your competitor list by plugging your URL in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and going to the Competing Domains report.

Now you can take the list of competitors to the Content Gap report to reveal the keywords that your competitors rank for but you don’t. These will be your new content opportunities. You can then filter that list to make it more manageable.

In the Content Gap report, you can filter out branded keywords for more clarity.

Additionally, you can easily discover your competitors’ best content. There are a few ways to do that, depending on your marketing objectives.

If you want to create content that is designed to rank on search engines and bring you organic traffic, try the Top pages report.

This report not only shows you the content and its traffic but also changes in traffic over time. This allows you to spot declining and trending topics.

But if it’s links that you’re after, you can use the Best by links or Best by links’ growth reports.

Finally, if you need social shares the most, go to our Top Content report to uncover content where your competitors got the most Twitter and Pinterest shares.

This report can also be used as a proxy for understanding what types of content resonate with your competitors’ target audiences because it also shows how many websites linked to that content and which parts were the most valuable (by viewing the anchors they linked with).

Apart from social media stats, this report offers insights into the reason why people linked to the content. You can click the “Details” button to uncover link anchors.

Study your niche

Another way of discovering relevant topics to enrich your content map is paying attention to what other people say in places where your industry and/or your target audience hangs out; for example, groups on social media, magazines, personal blogs, and communities.

A lot of the time, you will find information that overlaps with keyword research. But other times, you will come across hidden gems, such as:

• The next big thing people are talking about but no one has written a comprehensive guide for.
• Topics underserved by your competitors.
• Things your target audience wants to learn more about (and how they want to learn about said things).
• What language your target audience uses to express their goals and challenges.

For example, one of our best-performing articles, “How to Submit Your Website to Google,” was inspired by a printed magazine titled “How to set up an online business” that was found in an airport bookstore. 

If you think that’s too much manual work, you can try an audience research tool like SparkToro. Just plug in topics your target audience frequently talks about to discover related topics and hashtags (among many other things).

On top of topic ideas, SparkToro can also help you with identifying their demographics and discovering what media your target audience consumes.

Survey your audience

Try the obvious—just ask your audience what type of content will make their life easier.

If you already have some blog/newsletter subscribers on board, this step is as easy as preparing a questionnaire and sending it. Alternatively, you can display a short questionnaire on your site.

But if you’re just starting out, you can use an agile market research software like SurveyMonkey to get your questionnaire in front of the right eyes.

Here are a few questions you can ask:

• What would you like to learn about on this blog?
• What’s the biggest priority in your job?
• In the last months, what was your biggest challenge?
• Do you plan on buying our product in the near future?
• How did you discover our blog?
• What’s your favorite source of information about ___?

And that’s about it when it comes to the “traditional” approach to content mapping. Here’s what we, at Ahrefs, do differently and why we do it that way.

The traditional way of content mapping matches content to a single stage of the funnel. But that one-to-one match isn’t always the case. So we use a different approach that helps us create product-led content that brings over 273K visits from search to our blog every month.

A little bit of theory

The thing is that a single article can serve various purposes. It can attract a potential customer and help to retain an existing customer.

Moreover, in some cases, a single article can take the user down the entire funnel—from learning about a solution to purchasing the solution.

Let’s take our guide on how to rank higher on Google as an example. In six easy steps, it explains how to improve rankings of underperforming keywords and get more traffic as a result.

So let’s say someone Googles “how to rank higher on google.” That person is pretty much right at the top of the funnel because they’re aware of their problem but don’t know the solution yet. They may not have heard of Ahrefs and may have zero knowledge of SEO.

Being at the first stage of the funnel, they come across our guide. As the guide walks them through the process, it may also walk them through the entire funnel. They learn the solution (SEO) and learn that they need a tool like Ahrefs to implement the solution.

Besides, ask yourself this: Can you remember the last time branded content made you buy something? Was it one or more content pieces? Was your “buyer journey” linear or more complex? You may find that the map is not the territory.

The “business potential” framework

Because it seems that the models of the buyer’s journey aren’t always useful, we map content based on a scale of how crucial our product is in solving a given problem.

Let’s look at the business potential (BP) scale in detail and see some examples for each of the scores. If you want to dive deeper into this framework, you can skim through the articles below to see how our product is featured (or why it can’t be featured).

So if you want to create a content map with the use of our framework, it’s a really simple one—just the topic and its BP score.

Additionally, you can complement that with some SEO metrics (like traffic potential) if search engines are an essential marketing channel to you. So it can look something like this:

That said, there are still some similarities between our model and the traditional model. For example, we also use buyer personas. We don’t use them to “customize” every topic, though. We use them to understand who we are talking to so we can align the style and depth of the content.

For example, we’re trying to avoid marketing jargon, as we’re not targeting our content to marketing academics but rather marketing practitioners who are not always experts in this field.

You will find these tools helpful in creating and populating your content map:

• Ahrefs – SEO tools like ours are indispensable if you want to learn what people look for online, how often, and what words they use in their searches.
• Google Sheets – This is for using our content mapping template.
• Diagramming tool – Some examples include Lucidchart or MindMeister, which are great for creating buyer’s journey diagrams/maps. This is an additional (and harder) step you can take in content mapping. Do this if you want to better understand and/or visualize the buyer’s journey in your particular case.
• Survey tool – Tools such as Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, or Survicate can be used for getting feedback about your content.
• Audience research tool – Try SparkToro or Brandwatch for finding the topics that make your audience tick.

Final thoughts

Let’s complete this guide by discussing some advantages and disadvantages of these two content mapping methods:

So can we take the best of both worlds and create a hybrid? I think so. One way is to insert the business score into the stages of the buyer’s journey.

For example, you can require a score of 2 or 3 for content designed to entice people to make a purchase. Topics with scores 0 and 1 are OK as long as they are either in the interest, desire, or retain stages.

Whether that hybrid model works well enough is a conclusion I’ll leave you to make.

What’s next after mapping content? Try our resources on content marketing to learn things like content strategy, content creation, promotion, and repurposing.

Got questions or comments? Ping me on Twitter.