When you’re on the hunt for ideas for website content, it can easily feel like you’ve hit a wall.
Suddenly, you can come up with nothing. Nada. Zilch.
At that point, turning to SEO is a fantastic idea.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s a set of practices with the ultimate aim of helping your content rank highly in Google.
One of the central tasks of SEO is to identify content that will resonate with your audience, show up in their searches, and drive their traffic to your website.
Here are five SEO hacks to give you some inspiration for awesome content for your website, blog, or even social media.
Check Autocomplete
First, harness Google autocomplete.
When you start typing a query into Google, the search engine will automatically suggest possible ways to finish it.
These suggestions are based on queries that other users launched in the past. That means that people are interested in these questions and phrases. And that makes them prime targets for your next pieces of content.
Scroll to “People also ask” and “Related queries”
When you scroll down the first page of Google results, there are two sections that are worth gold when it comes to finding content ideas.
The first of them is “People also ask”. It’s normally located towards the top of the page and contains frequently searched-for questions related to whatever topic you’re interested in.
Then, at the bottom of the page, in the “related queries”, you can check words and phrases related to the topic you’re looking at. Often, these are more specific than the original term you searched for and can give you a spark of inspiration.
Take a Big Scoop With Answer the Public
Next up, it’s time to move on to some of the best SEO tools out there, which offer great sources of content ideas.
The first of these is “Answer the Public”. Here, you can enter a general word or phrase and find tons of related content ideas.
You’ll get a long list of questions, related search terms (in alphabetical order), phrases based around comparisons (“or”, “and”, “like”, “vs”), and prepositions.
The best bit? You don’t just get a list you can download as a CSV file, but also handy mind-map graphs that help you visualize possible ideas.
Answer the Public gives you three free searches per day. If you want to search more intensively, the pro subscription costs $99 per month.
Search for Popular Keywords and Evaluate their Difficulty
The next step in your quest for content ideas is advanced SEO tools, such as SEMrush and Ahrefs.
These tools can give you fantastic insights into keywords, and suggest related searches. SEMrush’s “Keyword Magic Tool”, for instance, allows you to filter for questions, related keywords, broad matches, and exact matches for any term you search for.
A huge advantage is also that these tools show you the volume and difficulty of keywords- and phrases.
A keyword’s volume tells you how many people search for a term every month. Keyword difficulty gives you some idea of how hard it is to rank for a certain term, meaning how much matching content there already is by your competitors.
Ideally, you want to find keywords with large search volumes and low difficulty.
The good news is that many highly specific queries that make for great content ideas match these requirements exactly.
Spy on Your Competitors and Find Inspiration
A final fantastic way of generating content ideas from SEO is to spy on your competitors.
Tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush allow you to gain some insights into any website out there. Enter the URL, and check out their most popular pieces of content, keywords they rank for, and average monthly traffic.
Then, you can analyze what they did right – and do it even better. Or simply gain inspiration from their shortcomings.
SEMrush allows you ten free searches per day. After that, plans start at $119.95 a month.
Ahrefs has no free plan, unfortunately, but a week-long trial for $7. If you decide to go with it after that, plans start at $99.
Conclusion
SEO research is a great way of finding content ideas that will resonate with your audience.
More than that, any content ideas you find this way are automatically geared towards ranking highly in search engines.
At the end of the day, using SEO for content research brings a double benefit – and lots of fantastic ideas for your site.
