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Traditional keyword research has a tragedy of the commons problem. The more people that use a common keyword research sources, the less valuable those sources become.

So you have a rapidly growing local business, and you are looking to expand. You have the brand, the capital, and the processes to open a second or even third location.

You’re in a growing metro area with lots of opportunity and open real estate.

And yet, you know that every real estate agent and business analyst will tell you that long-term success depends on “location, location, location.”

Now, if you were a national retail chain or a franchise owner, you could hire a location consultant to comb through census data and expensive proprietary business intelligence.

But you aren’t sure it’s truly worth the price. After all, your local real estate agent knows most of the metro market. And you generally know what the Census data says…even though the Census data is almost 10 years old.

So what can you use to gather hard data about what locations are most likely to succeed?

Creating content for your website requires a ton of time, money & resources to do well. But when it doesn’t generate visitors or sales – it’s a huge waste.

There are a lot of reasons why a piece of content might not perform well, but you can dramatically increase your odds of success by prequalifying your content idea.

In the offline world, companies use focus groups or sampling to prequalify the market. They use resumes and cover letters to prequalify candidates before committing to an interview (or much less a hire).

And the incredible beauty of the Internet is that you can prequalify your content ideas as well with the right tools and a bit of research.

Here’s how to use a range of tactics from keyword research to mining platforms to exploring past successes to find, inform & guide your content marketing ideas.

*Note – if you are interested in finding trending topics for social-optimized posts, also check out my Trending Topics guide here.

Anyone who owns a website and recognizes the opportunity to get visitors from Google organic search suspects the importance of keywords.

If you can appear in those results when someone types in a certain keyword – that’s not only a visitor…but a highly qualified, free visitor.

But how do you use those keywords on your website to actually get traffic?

Put them in the meta=”keywords”? Use them over and over on your site?

Note: nothing against Bing, but I’ll be using “search engine” and “Google” interchangeably in this post

It’s been more than 15 years since simply using keywords on your website was the only way for search engines to understand the relevance of your website. It’s no longer about just stuffing keywords all over your site. Search engines have gotten much smarter.

Google and Bing use hundreds of signals to try to decipher and rank the relevance of your website. They factor in what other people say about your site; they try to place your content in a graph of topics and entities, and perform all sorts of semantic analysis.

But keywords are still part of the foundation of how search engines understand your website.

Using keywords effectively on your website will help you tell a better story to both your visitors and search engines, and it will help communicate what searches your website is relevant for…so that you can get more visitors from search engines.

Here’s how to use keywords on your website with what is known in the SEO industry as a “keyword map.”

Wikipedia is the 800 lb gorilla in the Google search results. It ranks for almost half of all searches. It is the online resource. Google has even built large portions of its Knowledge Graph off the back of Wikipedia.

It’s also a motherlode of SEO resources – right behind Google Keyword Planner, Google Search, and Google Analytics. It’s useful for both on-page & off-page SEO for 2 reasons –

• Wikipedia is human knowledge. It uses language the way humans use it, because it’s written by humans. It connects topics and keywords in ways that only humans can.
• Wikipedia is the online resource. People trust it, use it, and reference it.

So whether you are just starting out planning your website’s keyword strategy, looking for new content ideas, or looking for ways to build trust for your website, here’s how to use Wikipedia for SEO and content marketing.