Need ideas for new content for your site? Let your Visitors, Google Analytics and Power BI help you!

If you are like me, you have probably stared at a white page wondering what your next topic should be on your blog. You have written about everything, what else could be said?

With our new dashboard, you will get help from your site visitors to get ideas on new topics. For creating this you need to have site search set up in your site.

Don’t, worry it is very easy to do.

What insights can we get with this dashboard?

As we normally do, let’s start with the results first:

In this dashboard you will be able to:

Find ideas for new content
Find new topics that your readers would be interested in
Understand if your blog is driving the right users to your site
Are your important pages hidden from your readers?
Publish your content on the most relevant places on your site.
What is your audience looking for in your site

Watch it on

If you would like to see a live version of the dashboard, you can watch it in our YouTube Channel, but if you prefer text, continue reading.

Download the Power BI

Don’t want to create the Power BI file?

If you are a member on our site (it’s free), you can download it by following this link.

You will need also to change the data source from my account to your Google account.

Do you need help creating the file or setting up your account? Contact me for more details.

Members Download center:

This download is for Curbal Members only. If you have a membership, please login and download the files from our download center *HERE*, if not, register!

But if you want to create the dashboard yourself, a step-by-step guide is available on the Power BI community.

Dashboard guide

Ok, Lets go through the dashboard to understand how to use it.

IMPORTANT NOTE: To be able to configure this dashboard, you need to have internal site search configured in your site and in Google Analytics.

Fist of all, we need to understand what the site is about: the dashboard above collects data from a site that is meant to help users set up and configure their synology servers.

Lets review every tile on the dashboard to understand how to read it.

1.Find ideas for new content?

Scrolling through the keywords I see for example: ”Automatic update WordPress”. It has been searched for only twice, but I know it is a great topic as it is a very useful feature that is not at all intuitive. Now I have a blog post ready!

Now, a really useful tip. Scroll down to ”H” in search Terms and look for ”how to” searches. If you don’t have a blog post on those, start right away. An insight served in a silver platter, thanks visitors!. 🙂

You can find not only specific ideas on new blog posts but on new categories.

2.What topics could be interesting for my readers?

For example, on our site, we find that 22 times visitors search with the word ”WordPress” on my site. At first sight you might think that they came to the wrong place, but in fact, some of the blog posts are guides to help users host their own WordPress blog on their server. Still, 90% of the content is geared towards general server configurations.

Perhaps I should write more about WordPress hosting on the synology server to assist my readers and perhaps gain some new visitors.

3.What are my visitors looking for in my blog and is my blog content aligned with the expectations of my visitors?

There might be times, where you find Search Terms on your site, that you might not think are relevant, but it might uncover hidden possibilities for you. For example, lets say that you are running a flower shop and you have also a website to promote it. By inspecting the Search Terms on your site you find that most of your visitors are searching for chocolate and they do not find anything as you only sell flowers. This could help you to, either inform your users that your do not sell chocolate or you can start selling them :).

4.Make sure your visitors never have to search for important pages

Your visitors should never have to search for important pages or info like your business telephone number or contact details.

Make sure you always scroll for those on your search terms list.

5.Publish your content on the most relevant places on your site

You have now discovered new ideas and created new content and you are ready to publish it.

Great, but wait a second, our next report will help you publish it where your visitors need it most. In the report below, you will see which term (Search Term) and which page triggered the search, Start Search.

In the example below, our visitor started searching for the term ”FTP” when he was reading the blog post: How to access your synology on the internet. I already have a blog post on how to set up FTP, so I should link to that content in this page.

In the case that I created new content, when it is published, I should link to it on this page.

Last but not least, if you are like me and use this report frequently, you don’t want to go over and over the same keywords, so for that, I created a bar chart.

6. Filter on monthly searches

I have a bar chart and not a calendar filter, because with the bar chart I can filter by date as the same time as I see the search volumes. Neat, uh?

7.What are the predominant words people search for?

Our word cloud visualization is a great way to visualize how many times a word is searched. For example, quickconnect is a word the word that is most searched on the site.

Perhaps I can write more about it or place the posts on a place that my users can find them without search?

Difference between the Search Term table and the Search Term Word Cloud

The reason why we have a word cloud and a table is because they work significantly different, and they are both useful on their own. Let me show you why:

When sorting our Search Term table alphabetically, WordPress shows up first:

But if we look at our word cloud quickconnect is the one most used. How is this possible?

Our word cloud visualization measures how many times a word is searched for, while our Search Term visualization table takes into account phrases. Therefore you get two different results, both very useful.

Word cloud settings:

To get the word cloud visualization to behave this way, you need to turn on the “Brake off” setting. You can also adjust the text size displayed on the cloud.

If you turn on the “Brake off” setting also recommend to turn on the “Stop Words” setting. What this setting does is remove the most common words like: a,the,an,and,any,are,as,at,be,because,been,but… so only useful words are counted and display.

You have also the possibility to use your own stop words. For example, because this site is about synology servers, I have synology as a stop word. I have also www because it is not relevant to me and it wont give me any insights.

You can also use this to remove temporarily the most frequent words (biggest ones) and see what other words pop-up. It is quite hard to work out the prominent ones within the less frequent words.

Difficult to read the words? Maximize the tile.

Now its your turn, what gold is your site search hiding?

Can’t wait to get this report in your hands? Don’t want to create the Power BI file?