Introduction
When it comes to blogging for any website, it is very common to get stuck thinking about a new topic to write about. This article will be going through 5 ways to develop great blog ideas that will help you gain new inbound traffic per month. With that being said, let’s get started with a summary of how blogging can benefit your SEO efforts.
A Brief Breakdown of Why Blogging is Good for SEO
When you look at the fundamental process of SEO, it comes down to optimization and focus on the following three factors:
- Off-Page SEO
- On-Page SEO
- Content Creation
For this article, we will concern ourselves with the 3rd point about content creation. The reality is, if you are a new website, your site still does not have the domain authority to compete for competitive short-tail keywords. As a result, to start getting your brand name out there while ranking for less competitive (long-tail keywords), there is no better way to achieve this goal than through blogging consistently. Although blogging is not a ranking factor, it is without a doubt a reliable means towards improving your overall Google rankings. The rationale behind this stems from the purpose of Google, which is to serve others. When you start a blog dedicated to answering people’s commonly asked questions regarding your industry and general services/products, you create a few opportunities for yourself. Among these include:
Increasing your credibility and positioning yourself as an authority to Google
When you blog, Google can see that you provide people value by answering their questions; the search engine will gladly reward you with your coveted first page ranking for long-tail keywords you targeted in your blog article. In addition to this, you end up building your brand, which can help build trust with your current and future customers, meaning that they will be more likely to purchase your product or service. Do you want to know “What is the Primary Goal of a Search Engine?” Check out our blog page today!
Quickly Obtain New Traffic for Less Competitive Keywords
In addition to building trust, consistent blogging can also benefit you by allowing your website to rank for long-tail keywords, which over time can accumulate in monthly traffic if you are consistently posting new content. The other additional benefit of targeting long-tail keywords through blogging is that these keywords are a lot less competitive. Generally, you can find yourself ranking for multiple variations of the same keyword within 2-3 months. All in all, although it may take effort to write the content initially, once it’s published and optimized, you can sit back and enjoy the inbound traffic every month.
Now that you know some of the benefits of blogging for SEO, let’s look at the five ways you can quickly generate blog ideas for your niche to capture more monthly inbound traffic.
Method 1 - Using Google Autocomplete for Blog Ideas
When trying to generate some ideas to write about, I recommend starting with Google’s autocomplete feature. To practically apply this, go to Google.com and type in your niche and then the letter a, as shown in the example below:
As you can see, Google automatically suggests potential topics and ideas that you can write about.
I would recommend going through every letter in the alphabet and compiling a list of potential suggested blog ideas that you can write about. So your search query should look something like this:
[Your Niche] + letter
Example: SEO + a, SEO + b, SEO + c … etc.
Other search queries you can type in to get more ideas include:
[Your Niche + For]
[Your Niche] + Tips
In addition to using Google’s autocomplete feature, you can get other blog ideas by utilizing a free chrome extension called “Keywords Anywhere.”
The way this extension works is that whenever you type a search query on Google, on the sidebar of your search results, the extension will suggest multiple keywords and related phrases to your initial search. Here is an example of a search query done for the term “SEO Tips”:
As you can see, the extension will automatically suggest additional related keywords that you can also compile in your list to get a few ideas you may not have thought about.
Method 2 - Using Relevant Forums
In addition to using Google’s autocomplete feature, another great way to generate blog ideas is by going to relevant forums for your niche. The best thing about going to relevant forums is that these forums are usually tightly knit communities that all share a passion for the same service or product your business is selling. As a result, not only are these communities highly targeted, but they can also provide you with some great questions from a consumer’s perspective that you can come in and answer.
To find some forums relative to your business industry and niche, try using the following search queries:
- Niche “powered by vbulletin”
- Forum + niche
- Niche + Discussion Board
- inurl:/forum niche
- Intitle: forum niche
- Niche inurl:/forums
Here is an example of our agency looking for SEO related forums to join and generate blog ideas from:
When you get admitted into a forum, take the time to look at the forum’s guidelines about posting. This is important because a forum can give you ideas, but it can also be used to generate long-term traffic to your blog article once you publish it. The best way to do this is to look for questions people ask within these forum communities, answer them through a blog post, and then link back to it in your forum response. That way, you serve your community while at the same time generating free additional traffic back to your blog.
Method 3 - Quora and Reddit
Another great way to generate blog ideas is by using more commonly used Q&A platforms such as Quora and Reddit. These platforms get a lot of monthly traffic, and every day more and more people are posting questions about your industry or niche. As a result, this serves as a great platform to get some great ideas for some blog posts. To find questions people are asking quite simply go to Quora and type in the search bar your niche like so:
After searching, click on the questions tab and take your time looking through all of the recently posted questions about your niche like so:
Although not all of these questions may be relevant to your business niche, there are undoubtedly some ideas that you can take away from common questions your customers are asking. So be sure to list a couple, do your research, and then start writing!
Method #4 - Answer the public
Another great site to help you generate blog ideas for your niche is Answer the Public. Suppose you aren’t familiar with Answer the Public. In that case, the website is a keyword tool that visualizes search questions by using a search cloud of common searches people make regarding a specific niche keyword. These search clouds can give you a lot of great blog ideas to write about.
To use the platform, quite simply type in a relative keyword to your niche (or your niche itself) as shown below:
Next, click “Search” and then scroll until you find the search cloud, which will look something like this:
As shown in the search cloud, there are alot of questions people are typing into Google that we can make note of and use as potential future blog posts and articles. Make sure to filter down the questions and only write about what makes sense for your webpage.
Method 5 - Amazon Kindle Suggest
Lastly, the final method of generating blog ideas that we will be covering is using Amazon Kindle Suggest. Although this might not be a common method that comes to mind for most people, it is a great way to easily generate great topics for your blog post. In order to apply this method quite simply head over to Amazon.com.
Next type in your niche within the search bar. For this example we will be using the niche word “SEO”.
Next, click on the “Kindle ebooks tab” like so,
Immediately as you can see we are presented with many more titles, and topics relative to our niche that we can easily draw inspiration from.
To take it a step further, you can even preview the e-book and take a look at the table of contents to generate even more blog ideas as shown in the example below:
Conclusion
All in all, blog idea generation shouldn’t be an issue for you. Although it takes time to write articles, it’s important to also spend a little time doing the research to write about topics people are actually interested in reading about. Fortunately, we hope that these 5 methods will help improve the efficiency of your research process and give you a solid foundation on where to look when seeking to come up with new blog ideas.
If you are looking for a completely hands-off solution for your businesses SEO and blog content creation, you can also check out our agency’s services. At Click Typhoon we are a dedicated SEO agency West London that specializes in both on-page and off-page SEO. We are ROI focused and look to make data-driven decisions to facilitate your businesses success online. If you are interested in seeing if we are a fit, feel free to book a discovery call today and we would be happy to assist you.
