How to generate content ideas for your next blog post

In this article we are going to explore 5 tools you can start using today to start generating content ideas. To illustrate this we are going to use one of client’s websites, the adventure travel company Mountain IQ.

Once of the destinations they specialise in Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Therefore, we’ll use kilimanjaro as our seed keyword throughout this article.

Answer The Public

After entering our keyword into the tool we can see an extensive tree of content questions are presented to us.

If we look at questions prefixed by where we see that there are 8 questions associated with this word around where Kilimanjaro is located and where one should stay when visiting.

In addition to this Answer The Public also serves up keyword ideas based on a range of prepositions as well as comparisons where people ask things like kilimanjaro vs everest base camp. These are fantastic keywords to go after.

Also Asked

This is a very similar tool to Answer The Public, however it’s free to use. Answer The Public only gives you 3 free searches a day, where as Also Asked offers an unlimited number of searches for free. This does however make it quite slow.

The nice thing about this tool is that it provides the relationship between questions and that enables one to dive deeper into a topic and be able to cover it in detail because you are aware of all the questions that people are asking around that given topic.

Google Trends

This well known tool provides insight into what is popular at any given point in time. If we search for kilimanjaro we see that around March 2020 we can see that interest in this topic dropped off significantly due to Covid-19.

What’s useful about this tool is that Google also serves up related queries and topics. How tall is kilimajaro? appears to be a breakout keyword as it’s up 140%. The good news is that Google Trends is completely free to use.

UberSuggest

This tool was created SEO guru, Neil Patel. It’s a free tool with a paid upgrade. Once you’ve put your keyword in it provides you with topline metrics such as search volume, and SEO difficulty.

A very useful feature is keyword ideas which displays a range of keyword idea based off the keyword you input. For each idea the tool will display the volume and difficulty of each keyword idea.

Ahrefs

Best until last as the saying goes. Ahrefs are the preeminent force when it comes to keyword research. In fact it’s the tool we used here at Contentellect. The depth and breadth of the data they provide goes unmatched.

You can start by inputting your keyword into the keywords explorer tool. At this point Ahrefs will render all the key metrics associated with that keyword including keyword difficulty, search volume and traffic in terms of clicks.

From here you click out to keyword ideas in the left hand menu bar where you’ll find a plethora of keyword ideas associated with your keyword. In this case the keyword kilimanjaro produced over 17K keyword ideas.

The beautiful thing is that Ahrefs provides a range of different filters that allows you to whittle down a large corpus of keyword ideas to a smaller and more relevant list. Our post on Driving Organic Traffic Using Question-Based Keywords explains in more detail how you can use these filters effectively.

Conclusion

There are many different tools you can use to find your next blog post topic, some are free and others are paid. Each tool has its pros and cons. To maximise the performance of your content marketing we’d advise using a combination of several tools so that in aggregate you can combine the very best features of each tool.