We’re asked quite often how we come up with new blog posts, the content for them and how we write about them. This is a video walk through on how we write posts that will rank well in search results. Showing how to write a post based on the search “EV Charger Installation”.
Video transcript:
Finding ideas for new blog posts
We’re asked quite often how we come up with new blog posts, the content for them and how we write about them. A good example is an article that was on the BBC’s website yesterday about electric car sales, which for an electrician is an obvious thing to be blogging about because it’s in the news at the moment and oil and fuel prices are very high.
So a lot of people are thinking of replacing their cars with electric cars. Now this article’s talking about the new car sales dropping but down here it says electric car registrations are up 79% to 39,000 in March compared to the previous year.
We know electric car sales are going through the roof and if you buy an electric car at some point you’re going to have to get a charger installed before the car comes.
Most searched electrical keywords
There’s obviously a requirement there so the way we handle this is we start off with what are the keywords people are searching for.
On our website we’ve got a list of the top electrical keywords. We have EV charger installation which was getting 2,400 searches per month on Google when this list was updated a couple of months ago.
Google Ads Keyword Planner Tool
Next we go to the Google Ads Keyword Planner Tool: https://ads.google.com/aw/keywordplanner
You can sign up for a free account for it and obviously what Google is trying to do is get you to advertise your company, but you don’t have to pay to set up an account.
What you can do is find out the keywords people are searching for. If I put in EV charger installation under keywords Google is going to give me a list of keywords related to that.
It’s come up with 597 ideas. Here’s EV charger installation currently there’s 2,900 searches a month. When we did our lists about two months ago, it was 2,400 so it is going up a lot. This little graph here shows the monthly searches for the last year. You can see in April 2021 it was 1,600 a month.
In February there were 6,600 searches for EV charger installation. This number here is the monthly searches and obviously it varies, but the average is going up and up.
With this number of searches each month it is a great term to be advertising for at the moment and a great term to write blogs about.
When we’re doing a blog, if we want to aim for this EV charger search, which is a big search, we’re thinking, first of all, what are the things people are searching for? What are people typing into Google? EV charger installation is the big one, but there’s lots of other related terms as well. If we scroll down here, we’ve got things like “car charger”, “EV home charger cost”
People are asking what does it cost to install it? And that could be people that haven’t yet ordered an electric car and are thinking about if I get one, I’ve got the cost of the charger. What does it cost? How much money am I going to save in fuel?
Zappi the brand is coming in there as well as pod point. Some of the searches will be a bit general and not really related to the installation side of things.
I’ve deliberately not looked for “EV charger”, I’ve put the word “installation” in there because we want people with a real need to actually hire an electrician.
Looking down here there is “install car charger at home”, anyone typing that in probably has a requirement to get one installed. “EV installation” is a bit more general. For me it’s not really an appealing term to be advertising for or writing about in blogs.
“EV installer near me” is quite good, 1,490 searches a month. “OLEV approved installer” is also good. There’s a lot of terms. These are just the big ones and there are 597 keywords that Google has come up with that people are searching for.
Long tail keyword searches
One thing you can do is to go down the bottom and look for the low volume ones. After the first hundred rows “install EV charging point” is searched 70 times a month. Rather than always focusing on the big keywords also focus on the little ones or what are called the long tail keywords. Everyone aims for the big electrical keywords but there are 500 here with less than 70 searches a month. They are smaller ones but there are so many of them that if you can start ranking in search results for some of those you will do very well.
The next step once we know what people are searching for is to think about how we’re going to use that information. There’s a few things I’m thinking about here. First up we know how many times the keywords are searched each month. We can see a few bits of data here, we can see in the last three months “EV installation” searches has gone up by 175%.
We know it’s a growth term and there’s more and more demand. We know the future is good for it and it’s a keyword that will be searched for in greater quantities in the months to come.
From a blogging and advertising point of view, it’s a really good thing to target. These numbers over on the right here are Google telling you what it costs to advertise for those keywords.
It’s saying at the top of the page the pay-per-click adverts the lower end of the budgets will be about £1.05 per click and the higher end £2.90.
For EV at the moment we’re normally aiming to spend about the £1.20-1.30 a click which is working well enough to get good inquiries without spending too much money.
From a blogging point of view what I’m thinking to myself is if we’re going to write a blog for somebody on EV chargers we’re probably going to write a sequence of blogs rather than a single one because it’s such a big opportunity to generate some traffic.
Headings and subheadings
We’re probably going to start off with a heading. And I think our first heading might be “EV charger installation” because that’s a popular search.
Then we’re going to be looking at some of these other terms to find subheadings that we can use down the page, for example, “OLEV approved installer” and then we’ll have a paragraph about OLEV.
We’ve also got the brands, Pod Point and Charge Point are search a lot but you should have a section for each of the brands you install.
Having a subheading with the brand name in it, and two or three paragraphs of text about the brand, what’s good about it, how you install it, and so on will work well.
Questions in Google Search results
Another thing you can do for ideas on the blog content is search in Google for the keyword you’re focusing on. For “EV charger installation” if we go past the ads and the map results you get this section here called “People also ask” and Google shows questions that are often asked relating to that keyword.
For example “Can I install EV charger myself?”, “Do you need to be an electrician to install EV charger” It helps rather than just focusing on what you do, your services, and so on, to answer questions that people ask and an easy way of doing that is to pick some of these questions and have them as a subheading and then write a paragraph below answering that question.
Google loves it if you answer the questions that people are asking and they’ll rank you very well in search results. You start off with the four questions here but if you click on one that’s relevant more questions will appear.
If I click on “Do you need to be an electrician to install one?” Google adds a couple more related to that question: “Can I charge an electric car from a 13 amp socket?” and “Can you install a Level 3 charger at home?” if I click on that one it adds a couple more. “Can I plug an EV into a regular outlet?”
By clicking on questions that are relevant to what you’re trying to rank for you find a few more questions that come up and suddenly you can write a blog that will rank well by answering questions as though people were asking you.
You’ve got all these different ideas, all these subheadings for different paragraphs, and it’s quite easy to get to a 700 or 800 word blog article about the subject by using these questions and using the keywords and adding your knowledge.
You can include your experience of what your customers are asking you about and add a few photos to add some interest to it.
Then you’ve got a good blog post that is aimed at the common searches that are being made at the moment. You’re also answering the questions that people are asking in the way that Google wants you to.
Within a fairly short space of time that blog will start ranking well in search results and bringing new people into the website that wouldn’t otherwise have found you. The right kind of people that are looking to have an EV charger installed and therefore have a real need rather than just those that are browsing around out of general interest.
I hope that’s useful. That’s how we go about putting together blog posts. How we formulate the strategy and we wouldn’t really do one post we’d probably do a 2, 3 or 4 post sequence and target different search terms in each one.
