5 unobvious ways to find content ideas

If you type “content ideas” into Google search, it will return more than 700 millions of results. Well, finding content ideas is an evergreen topic, so everyone wants to throw their two cents in. That being said, all these articles are telling us the same: ask your readers, read a lot, check forums, and so on. I, in turn, will try to suggest something that stands out.

I’ll talk about special services that collect users’ queries on Google, and share some ideas on how to turn this information into interesting articles and posts.

1. Soovle

Soovle is a simple service that collects Google’s search suggestions for the keyword, as well as suggestions from Yahoo, Bing, Youtube, Amazon, Wikipedia, Answers.

To get search suggestions in a question form, you need to put a question word before the keyword.

Note: Search suggestions are phrases that many people have entered into the search bar. Thus, the phrase becomes popular so that Google, for instance, guesses that you’re going to look for this information too. Here is how it looks like:

This drop-down list is search suggestions for your query.

2. AnswerThePublic

AnswerThePublic is a service that collects and sorts search suggestions. It sorts the results by questions, prepositions, comparisons, and alphabet.

It has a great visualization, as you can see in the screenshot. However, you can choose another format of the report:

3. Serpstat

Serpstat is an all-in-one SEO platform, where you can find search suggestions and search questions too. It works with 19 countries of America, Europe, and CIS and supports 19 languages.

The service finds search suggestions and its interrogative forms in real time. Also, it sorts data by groups for the question word. What is more, it gives you a list of most popular words that users often enter with this word.

Only with “how” question it finds 2018 results. (Happy holidays, by the way!)

How to use this information

1. Create topical posts

The simplest option that comes to mind is to create posts based on the popular search questions.

Enter your niche keyword into the service, for instance, “local SEO”. Now explore the report and then turn these questions into great headings for your posts.

The phrase “how to start local SEO business” we can turn into “10 steps to start local SEO business”. “Who needs local SEO” could be “How to find out if your business needs local SEO”. “Why do local SEO” turns into “10 reasons you need to start local SEO today”.

2. Prepare funny compilations of search questions

In every niche, people ask the search engine some totally weird and awkward questions from time to time. You can analyze it and choose the top ten most interesting ones for an entertaining post or infographics.

3. Find the demand for a product and promote it

Imagine that you have an online bookstore or a blog about psychology. It would be cool to make a post with the main theses from a popular psychology book or a post-compilation of recommended literature.
How to find out what topics they are interested in? Let’s see.

Just enter “psychology book” and explore the report:

You can see that people are looking for certain books and directions. Using this information, you can make a compilation of popular books with links to the demo versions. Readers will be grateful to you for saving their time.
It’s also a good way to keep track of what people are looking for and what they’re buying the most.

4. Create hashtags

There are few types of hashtags:

A brand hashtag for the brand awareness and promotion. It’s the name of the company.
Hashtag-rubric: #depositphotos_people, #serpstat_team.
Top-hashtags: to promote the post to the top of the search.

The services I mentioned earlier will come in handy when choosing the popular phrases for the promotion by hashtags. Hashtags are like keywords, so tools can give you a lot of new ways to tag your content. We’ve already described this in the article “A complete guide to Instagram hashtags“.

Also, you can use service called Hashtagify to choose keywords. This one shows the popularity of the word on the social media platforms.

Spark debates!
You want to shake up your audience, but you’re not sure how to do it. Just check search questions and find trending topics to start a conversation with your readers.

Final thoughts

Always try to push the limits of your content marketing and SMM strategies. Pay attention to the tools for bloggers, content marketers, and SEO specialists, and you’ll be able to do some magic with the help of these services!

I wish you more likes and shares!