8 Fresh Content Research Ideation Approaches

When it’s time to sit down and write a new piece of content, most people turn to traditional keyword research using a list of terms that they’re trying to improve upon, that competitors are ranking for, or from rabbit holes of endless searching using SEO tools.

But, sometimes, those lead you to find the same terms over and over again.

Here are eight ways to approach content ideation that can lead you to find new pockets of terms, both for informational and commercial queries.

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Start with Competitive Pages instead of Competitive Keywords

I rarely start with traditional keyword-based research unless I’m looking for ideas for a new site to build.

Instead, I follow a process that starts with top competitive pages. Think of this as starting out by looking at the forest instead of the trees. The strategy helps you identify pockets of keywords or topics of conversation that you’ve likely never considered and that you may have even ignored.

In the example below, we’re looking at money-saving websites. You’ll soon see that one of the top pages is likely something you’d never come up with on your own.

Here’s the basic process:

1. Identify three to four sites that compete with your website and/or are ranking for some of the keywords you want to target

2. Once you identify your top SEO competitors, check out who their top SEO competitors are. This will give you a sense of who you are really going after. If every site is a giant like Amazon or the New York Times, you may need to dig a bit deeper.

3. Review their top pages. If you were researching keywords for a money-saving site and pulling down a keyword list, you’d likely be tempted to ignore terms like “car vacuum near me” and “dry ice near me,” but when you use the top pages view, you can see that those two terms are part of their highest trafficked articles.

4. Seek out commonalities across the competitive set - in other words, look to see if several of them are ranking well for similar pages. In an ideal world, you would first pick the article topic that the competitive set wrote a year or more ago so that you can be the “freshest” piece. You will want to create a better, more informational piece than what has been published - add additional research, data, or first-party perspectives as a differentiator.

If your website is newer and/or struggling to rank for higher difficult terms, you can also spot-check the articles to see which target lower-difficulty terms. For example, you can see from the car vacuum article that the high-volume terms aren’t super difficult. But bear in mind that they are “near me” local terms, so this could be a little deceptive.

5. If there is a lot of content to pick off, you can also layer in data from top pages ranked by links. This element also gives you a sense of which pieces of content seem to attract the most natural links and/or that the websites deemed valuable enough to promote.

This could mean that there’s a high conversion value or affiliate revenue value. As an alternative, you could also look at where their internal links are pointing - that can give you another clue about which pages are most valuable.

Although it’s very easy to look at these reports independently, it is always better to export everything into a spreadsheet and combine the stats so that you have all of your information in one spot.

6. Next, you will draft a piece that combines the best elements of each of the competitive pages, add some strong internal links, and begin to promote it.

Here’s why this approach is better than targeting individual keywords:

Focus on topic clusters instead of individual terms
Gives you a sense of total volume rather than trying to cobble it together
Lets you see what type of content Google is ranking
Shortcuts the keyword research process

Hint: You can also seek out competitors off of individual pages or subfolders instead of starting with the root domain

For example, let’s say you want to target Nespresso machines, and there’s a big site ranking for an article on that. You can use that specific URL to do the competitive page research instead of using their entire domain. This can be helpful when dealing with huge websites like Wirecutter or The Spruce.

Example:

Search for Nespresso machine

Select the article URL you wish to explore and enter it into Ahrefs, SEMrush or another tool

Then look at competing pages and look for content that could augment what you or they have already written about (as an example, Nespresso deals). Alternatively, just perform a keyword gap analysis off of the URL you have entered and a few competitors.

2. Start your Research Process with Answer the Public

Many SEOs and copywriters use Google’s People Also Ask in order to identify content to add to existing pages or for FAQs. While this is a good source, it’s typically limited to a handful of questions unless you keep drilling down.

To shortcut the process, you can use a tool like Answer the Public. Answer the Public provides hundreds of suggestions off of one short 1-2 word query. Some are questions using “how, who, why” type modifiers, and others are comparisons and prepositions.

Hint: The default for the site’s output is a visual diagram, but you can click on the data link to see the keywords in a table. You can also export to a spreadsheet by clicking on the icon on the upper right.

You can then either export these terms to use in an SEO tool or just use their built-in legend on the visualization view to see whether the terms are searched frequently or have average or low frequency.

3. Start with Amazon, especially for Commercial Queries

Although it’s relatively easy enough to use Excel to map keywords to intent - informational or commercial - Amazon’s suggestions can help cut through the noise and identify popular commercial terms.

Ahrefs allows you to search Amazon, but it’s also easy to just pull up the Amazon website and start typing. You can start with a head term and keep narrowing down the list.

In this case, I started with “blender” and then refined to “blender bottles” and then “blender bottles electric” to find an even more narrow set of topics and keywords.

Even after drilling down three layers, you can see that it would be easy to keep refining the list further.

Hint: You can also do your search within a specific category if you are looking for a refined list. This can even work with the Books category if you want to get a sense of more informational topics.

4. Use the Subfolders Report to Identify Themes that get a lot of Traffic from Fewer Pages

One thing that I always think about is getting the most bang for the buck. This can mean finding articles that have the potential to rank for a lot of keywords or finding high volume relative to each point of keyword difficulty. (That’s how I tie break if two terms have similar volume!)

This content research strategy works best when the site has a really clean directory or folder structure. For example, below, you can see that Healthline uses good nesting.

To start your content research, begin by looking at the top subfolders and identifying the folders that have high volume with a lower number of pages. For example, you can see that the Exercise and Fitness folder has about half of the pages as the Baby one, but attracts comparable traffic.

From here, you will want to drill into the top pages from that folder to find the content pages and themes to target.

Hint: This is also an awesome strategy for commercial queries on eCommerce sites if you’re trying to figure out which merchandising categories are driving the most volume for your competitors.

In the example below, you can see that the lab-created diamonds folder only has one page, but it alone captures more traffic than the Halo folder, which has hundreds of pages.

We see the role of an SEO manager as driving revenue or leads, not just traffic. Use this approach to find new category pages or brand-new merchandising categories to present to your eCommerce clients.

5. Leverage Null Site Search Queries on your Website

Sometimes it’s best to look at internal data instead of using external tools or competitive sites to try to find new ideas.

One great option for content research is to review null site search queries on the websites for which you’re managing SEO. You may need to use data from Shopify or your search technology to spot these terms, or else you can configure Google Analytics to capture the information for you.

Although these keywords or topics may not always lead to high-volume content, they could be helpful as a part of the conversion journey. And you already know that your prospects are looking for the information.

Alternatively, you can also look for queries that only return one or a couple of results, as well, or you can find queries that lead to really high conversion and use those as seeds for additional keyword research.

6. Begin with High-Converting Paid Search Keywords with Low Click Share

It’s always ideal when SEO and Paid Search teams collaborate - even if the two things are managed by separate agencies or one is in-house, and one is managed externally.

Most paid search programs include some keywords that perform very well from an ROI perspective, but where the keywords have a low click share because of budget or allowable max CPC issues.

Access top converting keywords with low click share through Google Ads (or request a list from your paid search team) and then begin your traditional keyword research and content ideation process.

If your SEO agency is responsible for both paid and organic SEO, you can use this strategy to build a very efficient program that allows you to maximize your paid investment and leverage SEO to target keywords and topics that are less efficient from an SEM perspective.

7. Prioritize Your Expansion Off of Highest-Converting Organic Landing Pages & Queries

For this last approach, you will want to use Keyword Hero to identify your best-performing queries or use top-converting SEO landing pages from Google Analytics.

Use that as the base URL in Ahrefs, SEMrush, or your other preferred tool to find a list of competitive pages (as described in #1), then build a keyword gap analysis.

Use that list to create clusters manually, with a clustering tool, or even with an online N-Gram Analyzer.

While the traffic may be lower, you’re going to be focusing your energy on driving qualified traffic that is more likely to convert.

8. Alternative Search Engines (YouTube and Social)

Similar to using Amazon, as we described above, you can also use YouTube or social channels for inspiration. Tools like Ahrefs allow you to search Youtube for ideas, or you can use the platform directly.

The keywords and query volume in Ahrefs’ questions section can be especially helpful for creating informational articles.

However, you should use the platform directly to capture suggestions that are more timely, especially if you are trying to write more seasonal content.