This is a topic that comes up again and again.
In fact, just last week, we had one of our clients asking for our help on understanding how they could undertake research and choose the best titles and topics for future blog posts.
So, we thought we’d tackle the subject once and for all, here on our blog!
In this post, we’re going to take you through several ways we commonly come up with blog post topic ideas as well as keyword inspiration for ourselves and our clients.
Best of all, these are all things that you can do too.
So, if you’re struggling to find the right topics to engage your audience, look no further.
Here are our top tips for choosing the best titles and topics for your blog posts.
Get Blog Post Ideas from Google Analytics
Landing Page Reports
Google Analytics can be a great tool for getting insight into your existing content marketing efforts.
But, how can you use this for getting new blog post ideas?
Well, one of the main ways to use Google Analytics for idea generation is to learn from what seems to be working for your business already and try to replicate it elsewhere.
In Analytics, you can easily check what blog posts are already performing well.
You can identify trends around the types of posts these are, and use this information to inform what resonates best with your audience.
There are a couple of ways that you can do this:
Firstly, Open Analytics, choose the date range that you want to look at and then go to:
Acquisition > All traffic > Channels > click other > type in Landing page
Another way (and perhaps slightly easier) is to set the date range again and then go to:
Behaviour > Site Content > Landing Page (add segment to show organic results)
For example, recently we were tasked with thinking about what content topics one of our clients, an online training provider, should be writing about.
We began by looking at their Google Analytics data and identified that their best performing blog posts seemed to be focussed on specific skills that people could learn, rather than the courses themselves.
As such, we then decided that our client should focus on creating new content that focussed on other skills or subject areas that people may want to find similar information for.
Simple eh?
Site Search:
Another way to find out what’s important to your users, and the info they are searching for on your site, is by using the information from your site’s search function.
Here, you’ll be able to find every search query that has been made on your site.
This is really useful information when it comes to coming up with blog post topics. as you can see the exact questions or queries that your customers or potential customers are already trying to find on your website.
You know these people are already engaged with your brand and are looking for something specific.
You can then take a look at the content on your site and if you have the topic already, you can further improve that content, or if the topic isn’t covered, create something new to meet the search demand.
You can find this all the search terms that people have used on your site search, by going into Google Analytics and looking under Behaviour > Site Search > Search Terms.
Use Google’s Autosuggestions To Get Blog Topic Ideas
Another great way to get guidance or inspiration of what topic or titles to explore further is to use Google’s autosuggestions and the related suggestions at the bottom of Google’s search page results.
They’re always worth exploring.
You may already have an idea of what you want to talk about, but both of these can help to expand your train of thought and uncover potential avenues for exploration.
On top of that, you already know that these are topics and areas that people are already searching for.
All you need to do is go to Google and start typing a keyword that’s relevant to your business that you might want to write about.
As you type, you’ll start to see suggestions of other related topics and things that people have been searching for.
It really is that simple!
This is great as you can see popular topics to do with your keyword, and therefore get good suggestions of the types of topics to write about.
In the screenshot below, I’ve used the term “SEO”
Now, taking this example, if I were looking for ideas on content to create around SEO, “SEO for Google My Business” might be something I’d start to look into.
Similarly, at the bottom of the results page, there will be related searches (often different from the autosuggests – note that “SEO tools” and “SEO Course” weren’t in the autosuggest results) that you can take inspiration from:
Try this out, add keywords related to your services or your products and see that comes up, often you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Find Blog Post Topics Using Answer the Public:
A great tool for getting topic suggestions is Answer the Public, which can take a lot of the manual work out of this for you.
All you need to do is type in a query/keyword and you’ll get a whole load of information on search questions and autocomplete searches related to that keyword.
From this, you can take away lots of suggestions for related topics and searches.
The best thing, this is all built on real data (and there’s a free version).
In the screenshot below I’ve used the search term ‘SEO’ and filtered by questions. As a result, you can see 79 different questions related to SEO, categorised by When, Will, Which, Where, Who, Are, How, Why, What & Can type questions:
Pretty useful huh?
If the question results don’t give you what you’re looking for, never fear.
As well as questions, you can also see results by Prepositions, Comparisons, Alphabetical and Related terms.
Undoubtedly one of the best tools out there when it comes to getting topic ideas for your bog.
Find Blog Post Topics Using SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool
This one is slightly less accessible, as you do need a subscription to SEMrush, but it’s a great tool to have in your locker.
When it comes to generating blog post topic ideas, you’ll want to look into the keyword magic tool.
It does a similar thing to the Answer the Public tool above but provides more information about search volumes, competitive difficulty, seasonality, and the types of content that Google is already indexing for a given query.
Simply add your keyword into the search bar, filter by the country you’re targeting and then look at the questions tab.
As you’ll see below, I’ve once again looked at questions related to the term “SEO”.
We’d recommend looking at the questions with low keyword difficulty and high search volume, as these are easier to rank for and will bring you more traffic, but be warned, these are quite often hard to come by!
For this reason, you may want to look at more long-tail terms to find the perfect blend of the two!
Customers/Sales Team:
Speak to your customer service or sales teams. They are one of the best places to go to find keyword and content inspiration.
It’s likely that your customer services or sales team will be speaking to your customers and potential customers more than anyone in your business.
As such, they’ll often have the best understanding of what those customers like and dislike, the information they’re looking for, and any problems they might have.
These are all fantastic starting points when it comes to blog post topics and can also help with keyword inspiration.
Monitor your Competitors:
Monitoring your competitor’s output can always be a great source of inspiration.
If you’re also looking for keyword inspiration, then this is one of the first places you should look.
By monitoring your competitors, you can identify better ways of communicating on the same subjects as them, or look at the topics they’ve covered and expand on these with even better content.
Your competitors will be targeting the same audiences as you, and so by looking at the content they are producing, you’ll be able to get a good idea of what is and isn’t working for them.
When it comes to monitoring your competitors, there are a few things that we’d recommend doing the following:
- Read their blog posts
- Subscribe to your competitors’ email lists
- Follow their social channels
- Setting up alerts for mentions of their brand and keeping a record of where they appear in various news and media outlets.
- Turning on notifications for their sites, via your browser, to stay on top of any updates.
So, there you have it, 7 easy tips for getting ideas on the types of topics you should be writing about on your blog.
Let’s recap, these were:
- Landing page reports
- Site search
- Google’s Autosuggestions
- Answer The Public
- SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool
- Customer Service/Sales Teams
- Competitors
If you have any questions on any of the above, or if there’s something you use for getting blog post inspiration, let us know in the comments below.
Contact Us
If you’re looking for support with your content marketing or copywriting efforts, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Our content experts would love to help. Give us a call on 01273 733433 or leave us a message via the form below: