How to discover great content ideas by studying your niche

Regardless of the niche that your business falls into, be it business consulting, health care, insurance, photography or anything else, the chances are a ton of people are talking about it online. There might be forums or different online communities, where your ideal customers are hanging out. There might also be groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit or Slack. And there might be some sites where people leave their reviews about relevant products or services. In other words, there's no shortage of places online, where you can go and watch your target audience communicate and speak their mind. Even Reddit alone can supply you with enough content ideas to keep you busy for months. There's a subreddit for almost anything. But let's not forget that we need to:

• make sure that people are actually searching for these topics in Google
• estimate the total search traffic potential
• see if there's a parent topic that we could target
• look at the number of linking websites among the top-ranking pages.

Studying your niche and getting in the heads of your potential customers helps you to create highly relevant content on your blog and get targeted traffic from Google.

1. Go where your target audience is hanging out
2. Look for things that bother people the most and the language they use to describe them
3. Whenever something strikes you as a great idea for an article on your blog, test this content idea for search traffic potential and ranking difficulty. Try to find at least three cool article ideas.

How to generate keyword ideas using keyword research tools

There are quite a few awesome tools that help you study what people are searching for in Google.

• This free tool called **AnswerThePublic** which is quite popular among SEOs and content marketers. Give it any word or phrase and it will return a list of relevant questions that people put into Google. For example, if I type "cats" into the search bar, It will give me almost 200 questions that contain the word "cats:" "can cats eat dog food", "where cats like to be pet", "which cats sheds the least", etc. You're probably wondering, how does this tool know what people are searching for? As stated on their homepage, they use Autosuggest feature in Google and Bing to give you keyword suggestions.
• Here's another similar tool that is based on Google Autosuggest feature. It's called Ubersuggest. The difference between the two is that Ubersuggest doesn't focus on questions. And all their keyword suggestions will start from your seed keyword. Everything starts with the word "cats". Both of these tools don't show you the monthly search volume of the search queries they suggest.
• Google Keyword Planner, it's a part of AdWords - Google's advertising platform. This tool used to be the single best source for keyword ideas back in the days, but in recent years Google was taking more and more data away from SEO professionals. So today Google Keyword Planner is a great tool for advertisers, that want to pay for traffic from Google, but not so much for SEO professionals, who want to get free traffic from Google". And yet, you can still get great keyword ideas from Google Keyword Planner. If I enter the word "cats" I'll get a few hundred cool keyword ideas, and the tool can even sort them into groups, which is rather handy and useful. The main downside is that you don't see monthly search volume of these keywords. You only see ranges, which are not super helpful. And if you want to see the actual numbers, you'll have to start an advertising campaign and put some money into it. But in any case, Google's own keyword research tool should not be ignored, even though they limit the data that you get for free.
• Ahrefs Keywords Explorer runs on a monstrous database of 4.6 billion search queries. We use multiple sources of data to collect a database of this size. But the main one is clickstream. In short, clickstream data comes from a large group of mostly free apps that you install on your computer and give them permission to collect your browsing data, anonymize it and aggregate into a huge clickstream database and aggregate into a huge clickstream database. From this database digital marketers can then learn what people search for online and which websites they visit. But there's no personal information on any of these people. Clickstream data is literally a rescue to the SEO community as many amazing tools and features can be built on top of it. So back to Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer. If I enter the same word "cats" I'll get a list of almost a million search queries that contain the word "cats" in them. Narrow down a huge list of keyword ideas to those where you don't need any backlinks to rank.

Just feed these tools with words and phrases related to your niche and examine the output. And don't forget to always look at the total search traffic potential of the top-ranking pages and how many backlinks they have.

How to find keywords that your competitors are ranking for

We can study our competitors, pinpoint their best performing content and beat them at it.

1. First, you need to know who you're up against. You might already know which websites you're competing with in Google search results. But in case you don't, just put the keywords found in the previous excercise into Google and see who ranks there. Those are your competitors.
2. Look for all other search queries that a competitor ranks for.
3. Group all these keywords that a website is ranking for by the ranking page, so you can easily see which articles bring the most search traffic to a competitor's blog.
4. See all the best performing pages of any competitor.
5. Cherry-pick the pages that bring them the most traffic while having the least amount of websites linking to them.

How to find low-hanging content ideas from all over the web

Point 3 tells how to research the content of your competitors and find some golden nuggets that you can easily replicate on your own blog. But you can only do this one competitor at a time. How cool would it be to research the entire niche at once?

1. Find all pieces of content that mention a specific word in their content, title or both.
2. See how many of these pages get over a thousand visits per month from Google.
3. How many of these pages generate their search traffic with no backlinks pointing at them?
4. Sort them by the amount of search traffic to see the best ones on top.

Note: As a general rule, it can be challenging to outrank websites that have high Domain Rating. If both articles have 0 backlinks, it is obvious that Google will pick the one, that was published on a stronger website. But if you build a bunch of quality backlinks to your own article, you do have a chance to outrank even high-DR domains.

How to prioritise your list of content ideas

Your spreadsheet of content ideas is full of golden nuggets. How do you decide which of them you should tackle first? We're going to focus on the business value of blogging. Add one more column to your spreadsheet and name it Business value. To fill a cell in this column you'll need to ask yourself: "What are the chances that a person, looking for that thing in Google and reading my article on that topic would become my customer?".

Give to content ideas a score from 0 to 3:

• 3 means your product or service is an absolutely irreplaceable solution for a target search query, which leads to an easy sell
• 2 means that your business will help people with what they are searching for, but it's not essential in solving their search query
• 1 means that your business can only be mentioned in passing, because the search query is only slightly related to what I sell.
• 0 means that there's not even a chance to squeeze a single mention of my business into the article.

The goal is not to grow monthly amount of traffic but to make your blog a customer aquisition channel and grow the monthly number of leads that it generates.

Ignore topics with huge traffic potential in favour of topics with huge business potential.

e.g. According to Ahrefs, HubSpot blog gets almost 2M visits per month from Google. Which is an absolutely staggering number. Their best performing article is a tutorial on making a gif image. Does this article grow their business? Well, the product that HubSpot sells can be described as a "marketing CRM". And if you ask me, the road of someone looking for tutorial on making a GIF image to becoming a paid user of a "marketing CRM" is kind of a maze. People who are searching Google for "how to make a gif" are clearly not their dream customers. So this content idea would get a business potential score of 0.

The articles that bring the most search traffic to Ahrefs blog: "Keyword research", "Top google searches", "Website traffic", "SEO tips", "SEO audit" etc. These articles convert readers into customers of Ahrefs very well. Here's a tweet from last week to prove it.

Search volume doesn't equal business opportunity. The searchers' intent behind your search query does.

That is why marketers are so obsessed with keywords that have the word "buy" (or it's synonims) in them: "best place to buy dslr camera", "hire a business coach", "rent an apartment in london". These searches clearly indicate that the person behind them is one step away from pulling money from their wallet.

However, you should not ignore their generic versions with much higher search volume just because the search traffic coming from them would be harder to convert into customers, especially if you have some experience writing good sales copy and persuading people to buy what you sell.

A person searching for "business coach" might not be ready to hire one right away, but it is your article that could persuade them to do so. So if the more specific search query with a clear buying intent gets a business value of 3, the generic one would still get 2 from me. All you need to do is just stay reasonable with your business value scores and don't fall for writing guides on how to create a GIF image, unless of course you sell some kind of software for creating gifs.