Lots of variables affect the effectiveness of your blog content. Many opportunities for optimization are out there. All this optimization is for nothing, however, if you start in the wrong place. 

To make sure your efforts are all moving you and your business in the right direction, you need to come up with blog topics that are meaningful to your business and to your audience.

To come up with effective blog topic ideas that will rank on Google, you can use some tools to uncover topics that are in demand by your audience. If you want to increase the SEO performance of your website, start with pertinent blog topics. 

By writing quality content on relevant, in-demand topics, your SEO optimization is likely to be more effective than if your blog posts don’t resonate with your ideal customer in the first place.

Here are 5 tools to generate content ideas that will boost SEO performance…

Before you begin using tools to generate content ideas, you need to put a token in the slot. In this case, your token is a keyword for which you would like to rank. Consider what words or what phrase people will be searching for when they seek a business like yours. 

A number of free tools will help you generate keywords. Keyword Tool is a good, free alternative to Google Keyword Planner. By punching in one keyword idea, it will generate 1000s of long-tail keywords that you can choose from. It will turn your foray into keyword generation into hundreds or thousands of suggestions, with information on Google search trends and what people are actually seeking.

LSIGraph is useful too. It gets straight to business. Just prove you’re not a robot, and it will provide you additional keywords related to your idea. 

Before going into the list below, grab yourself a keyword that makes sense for your ideal customer to be using. 

1. Google Suggest and People Also Ask

Using Google Suggest is also a great way to find keywords your audience is looking for. When you start typing, Google attempts to predict what you are searching for, based on its vast experience, receiving and analyzing our searches. It gets it right with ever-improving accuracy. As you type, Google makes suggestions that are similar to your keywords. And this is great news for marketers. It provides a quick and relatively easy way to grab many long-tail keywords and variations based on an initial search.

For example, a guitar business might try entering: “How does a guitar …?” replacing the ellipses with a, b, c and so on, working through the alphabet to find relevant topics relating to guitar parts and accessories. In this way, you can choose the topic area, and Google can help you be more specific and add a variety, using its unique knowledge of what people are searching for most.

Then when you arrive at the search results page you may be presented with a section in the search results titled “people also ask” which gives you related questions people frequently Google.

2. Answer the Public

Answer the Public uses the same philosophy of using Google’s auto-suggest results as a deep and valuable source of research for blog content ideas. Using these results from Google and Bing, Answer the Public helps you to turn your topic idea into questions that add dynamism to your topics, widen your content writing area, and also put you in touch with the emotions behind people’s search queries.

The site features visualizations that can help marketers create content and generate content ideas in a way that is not only easy-to-use but also fun. It allows you to turn your idea into content that is designed to tie into the emotions of your audience and fulfill their actual needs. It can save you trawling through Google or Bing and help you fill your content calendar fast.

3. Text Optimizer Content Ideas Tool

This tool helps you turn your keyword into a topic idea or question. This is great if you know that you need to target a keyword, but you are not sure how to approach creating content using it.

Not only that, but Text Optimizer also gives you an idea of the number of people asking that question, with a score of 0 – 5. If you see that very few people are interested in the topic you were considering, you can find out now, rather than creating the content and learning the hard way. 

In addition to telling you how many people are searching for a particular topic, it will also tell you how many sites are publishing an answer. The ideal for most businesses would be to find a question that many people are asking and that few websites are answering. This is likely to help you reap the best rewards. 

4. BuzzSumo Question Analyzer

If you want to get more in-depth with how many people are asking questions using or related to your keywords, BuzzSumo’s Question Analyzer should be your next stop. It uses Amazon, Reddit, Quora, and many forums and Q&A sites to tell you which questions are the most popular. 

Rather than being restricted to searches via Google and Bing, this site uses a wide range of resources. This makes it particularly useful if you want to get the zeitgeist of social media, monitor your brand’s performance and image, or identify gaps in your product descriptions based on what people are asking about related products online.

Using BuzzSumo is a great way to start creating content because it makes sure that you know how interested people are likely to be. Before you write a word or create an infographic, it’s good to know how much people actually want to know what you’re planning to say. 

We recommend BuzzSumo for generating ideas, researching the questions of your customers, and for monitoring questions about brands as well as topics.

5. SEMRush Topic Research Tool

Don’t consider your content idea generation complete until you’ve spent some quality time with SEMrush’s Topic Research Tool. It’s great to know what topics you want to cover with your content and how well they will resonate with your target audience, but it’s even better to know how this content compares with the different types of content that your competition is putting out.

Semrush’s tool works by taking your keywords or topic and providing you with a massive amount of information and ideas based on your input. It then takes this information and tells you how to frame your topic best, considering the headline, the kinds of question to ask, and related topics that will be relevant to your audience. 

There’s little point repeating strategies that have already been tried and tested and have failed. By using SEMrush, you can learn from your competition’s mistakes and their successes to speed up your own success and save yourself some time, money, and effort. 

You can learn the keywords that your competitors are using, discover organic competitors you may not have known about, and see how well, or otherwise, your competition is doing with its strategy.

Using SEMrush starts at around $100 per month and it’s worth every dollar if you’re a content marketer. 

SEMrush’s keyword magic tool can also pull frequently Googled questions for virtually any keyword. This is a particularly fast, efficient, and effective way to use a simple keyword or basic keywords to create killer blog content ideas that will satisfy and delight your audience. 

Honorable Mention: Quora

We don’t want to get off stage without an honorable mention to Quora. It’s a great place to visit for content ideas because you can literally see what Quora visitors are asking. You’ll see the number of questions on your topic or using your keyword. And you can also see how many people have responded and how well. This information gives you a good idea of how you can position your own content to satisfy your audience’s questions and fill their gaps in knowledge.

Quora is also useful as a platform for your own content. It’s a great place to position yourself as an expert or authority in your field. You can create a killer piece of content that answers a relevant question on Quora and provide a subtle link to a larger article or more information on your own site.  Done well, this can be an effective way to get more quality traffic to your website.

Conclusion

While SEMrush is our favorite of these tools for generating awesome content, you can use a combination of these resources to elevate your content creation. Give some of these tools a try and you’ll see that they give you a great start so that you make the most of your content by honing the idea and the delivery.

If you have colleagues who could do with help creating killer blog content ideas, feel free to share this article with them. If you like the sound of better content ideas and you’re ready to take your content creation to the next level, reach out to Blog Hands to learn more.