A fantastic idea is at the heart of any content campaign or project. Excitement around an idea is what sustains you through the (sometimes) long slog of creation, and it's part of what gets your audience to share, share, share.
Putting time and energy into a bad idea is a waste of your resources and has the potential to turn your audience off. Plus, if your decision maker sees too many resources invested in too many ideas that fail, you could lose credibility, autonomy, and — worst-case scenario — your job.
Which all makes coming up with the idea sound kind of intimidating. But finding the right idea doesn't have to be difficult. And finding a truly great idea can result in traffic, conversions, and the adulation of the masses.
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Creating content that solves your audience’s needs
Before we start delving into ideation, we need to start with our audience and their needs. While we covered the importance of audience research and personas in Chapter 2, it’s worth going back to this concept here.
Content strategy revolves around people and providing them with content they find informative, interesting, and relevant to their needs. Before you jump into brainstorming and research, follow an exercise to put yourself in their shoes.
As we mentioned before, there are many ways to better understand your audience, such as visiting your brand’s brick and mortar locations, speaking with your customer service teams, reviewing forums to see what questions they’re asking, conducting surveys, etc. You’ll want to review this data to look for insights, such as:
What are common questions my audience has?
What topics are they trying to educate themselves about?
What don’t they understand?
What criteria is your audience evaluating when making their decision?
What are their interests?
Think through these concepts and start to empathize with your customers before even thinking about ideation. Ideas that work best will be those that come from connecting with your audience on a personal level.
The benefit of putting yourself in your users' shoes isn’t just great for user experience, but for site visibility as well. If you are creating content that resonates with your customers, their user signals will be visible (low bounce rate, high CTR, etc). There's conflicting data as to whether Google monitors these user signals to determine the successfulness of your content. Regardless, the chances are that if your audience likes your content, Google will too.
Where ideas come from
Ideas are all around us. Sometimes we need to focus to find them, and sometimes we need to let go a little. These tactics, which range from how to think openly outside of the box to tactical, analytical tips, should help you and your team find your best ideas.
Brainstorms
Everyone brainstorms, but few people do it well. To set yourself up for success and avoid group think, follow these guidelines and remember the brainstorming space is sacred. That means that whether you're meeting in a room or building a shared board on Pinterest, all ideas are good ideas (at least for now).
Tips for running a great brainstorming session
Get the creativity flowing:
If your group is unusually quiet, try an icebreaker or two to get them into the brainstorming spirit.
Keep the field open:
Because all ideas are good ideas at this stage, it can be really important for the meeting organizer to keep the conversation on a "yes, and" level rather than a "no, but" one. That means recognizing the validity of each idea and helping to find a way to incorporate it.
Find the spark:
Look for ideas that spark attention, grab interest, stir desire, and inspire action. Re-focusing your brainstorming partners on these criteria can also help bring the truly off-task brainstorm back to a more productive realm.
Record everything:
Capture all the ideas (however outrageous) on a whiteboard or any place that the group can feed off of them. Take a picture or good notes. It's always important to have a record of your process in case you need to find a second idea (or remember the nuances of the first one). For remote brainstorming, we like Miro.
Competitive research
Like we discussed earlier, it’s worth noting the difference between direct business competitors and content competitors. When doing competitive research, you’re likely to evaluate your direct business competitors to understand their strategy and the topics they’re dominating, but you also need to consider content competitors.
These can include websites that are ranking for the topics and keywords you’re targeting, but aren’t selling the same products or services as you. Industry publications, education websites, and news outlets could all be content competitors. These are important to review because even though they aren’t competing with you for sales, like direct competitors, they are competing with you on visibility and can divert your target audience away from your website.
You're probably already reading your competitors’ content and performing an eye test to see if you think what they’re doing is appealing or not, but there are other ways to get a handle on what they’re working on and what’s performing best.
Here's a great SEO competitor analysis guide that will show you how to start your competitive research. We'll also cover some of this below if you want to dig a little deeper or use a wider toolset. Either way, this SEO workflow chart might give you a few ideas of things to consider as you start your analysis.
What you want to know in your research is:
What type of content are the top brands writing?
What's getting links?
What keywords are the top traffic earners?
Who follows whom and what do they share?
What types of content are content competitors creating?
A good way to start this research is to perform a Competitive Gap Analysis, but you also need to keep tabs on what competitors are creating on an ongoing basis. Tools like Google Alerts help you find brand mentions on the web, which in turn helps you see what kind of content is earning attention for your competitors. You can also sign up for their newsletter to see what new content they’re promoting themselves. Pro tip: You may want to use your personal email vs your company one to sign up unless you want to tip them off about your stalking.
Remember, content is more than simply what’s is on their blog. You should also be looking at and analyzing their landing pages, white papers, and even product descriptions to see what they're doing well (and not so well). You never know when an idea is going to strike.
What content has performed best for competitors?
Think about performance not just in terms of website visibility, but also in terms of placements (links) and social engagement. Use Link Explorer to see which pages on your competitors' sites are getting the most links and who those links are coming from. Check out Buzzsumo to find out what content is getting the highest social shares and who is doing the sharing. Use a tool like Followerwonk to analyze the tweets of your competitors’ followers to see what their audience retweets and favorites, along with who they mention most often.
Remember: don’t only look at your direct business competitors, but any website you’re competing with on the SERP.
Researching top content from both direct and content competitors can offer insight into what topics and types of content might resonate well with your audience based on past successful performance. While you probably don’t want to replicate what’s performing well exactly, you can use these pieces as inspiration. Consider using some of the same formats that are performing well, or approaching a topic that’s been shared a lot from a different angle.
Trending topics & newsjacking
Content ideas aren’t only sparked after seeing content that’s already been published. You can prove to your boss you’re a content savant by staying on top of trends gaining steam in your industry and reacting to industry news.
One of the best tools to help with this is Google Trends. Start by entering topics and terms related to your business, and see how they compare in popularity. Scroll beyond the first chart to find related topics and terms that are skyrocketing in popularity, then consider working them into your content strategy.
To keep a close eye on relevant news and content in your industry, monitor topics that matter for your business via tools like Google Alerts and Buzzsumo. By setting notifications, you’re able to get emails right when news hits.
Another way to monitor for news or trends is through social listening. Are there dedicated industry hashtags or social accounts that provide the latest news? You can monitor content from these influencers directly by creating a list on Twitter and reviewing that filtered list of tweets to catch something important.
Why is this so important? Well, one, being aware of and writing about trends in your space proves that you’re an expert in your industry, and two, keeping so close to hot topics creates an opportunity for you to newsjack.
No, newsjacking isn’t a Mr. Robot tactic. It’s a way to quickly capitalize on breaking news in a relevant way. Say you work for the plumbing company we talked about above, and a story breaks about a cruise ship losing power in the ocean and all of their systems breaking down—including the bathroom facilities (yikes).
Newsjacking is the practice of quickly reacting to create content in connection with a big story. Perhaps the plumbing company’s content team could write a piece on the causes of the disaster and how to prevent this type of debacle in the future. The key to being able to successfully newsjack, in addition to closely monitoring the news and making sure your target keyword topics are related, is having a framework for your team to get quality content launched as quickly as possible. If it takes you a few days to react to the story, you can say “bon voyage” to your opportunity to gain attention.
We've got a guide for that
Looking for more in-depth info on competitive analysis? Check out the Guide to SEO Competitor Analysis — it has everything you need to level-up your race to rank.
There's no end to seemingly mundane industries that aren't much fun to talk about, but they still need great content. Banking, roofing, hydrology services, you name it. Many people consider anything outside the fashion/entertainment realm (aka anything you can't link a celebrity's name to) to be a difficult topic to write about.
That's just not true. There are no truly difficult topics if you can key into what makes you excited about something. Because there are people out there who are very much like you and are curious and nerdy about the same things you are.
How can you maximize your benefit from the new IRS IRA laws?
What are the best kinds of fasteners to use with cedar shingles?
How much erosion is too much erosion?
These are all completely reasonable (and interesting) topics for the right audience.
If you feel like you've exhausted the easy wins and answered all the FAQs, go back to lateral thinking, grab a buddy, and brainstorm what makes your industry fun or interesting to you and your audience. Watch the movies they watch, read the news sources they're into, and listen to the music they like. Learn about the industry and keep your mind open for questions that occur to you along the way, and then turn answering those questions into your next set of content ideas.
Repurpose old content
Learning how to repurpose old content and either improve it or turn it into other forms of content for your site is a great strategy to use when you're lacking the brain power to create entirely new content.
Discover how Ross Simmonds repurposes old content in his Whiteboard Friday:
SOLUTIONS SPOTLIGHT
3 content ideation tips for SEOs
As an SEO, you should always be thinking about how your business can create valuable and useful content for your clients. Follow along with how Chris Giarratana of StrategyBeam uses Moz tools to uncover lucrative content ideas.
Content marketers and SEOs live between the questions their audience asks. Brainstorming is one of the most complex aspects of content marketing because you must use the right tools and methodologies to both discover content gaps in the market and then craft a strategy to produce content around your customers' needs and the solutions your business offers.
You can use different tools for content marketing ideation to reverse-engineer your competition, find content gaps, and discover questions that people ask about your brand. Like classical economics, creativity needs to balance supply and demand in the marketplace if you want to create the best content and generate results.
Let’s dive into three ways I save time on researching ideas for new content and searching for ways to optimize existing content.
1. Find content gaps in the marketplace
The first ideation strategy that I use when building a content marketing plan is to find missing content gaps in the market so I can create content to meet my customers' needs.
This approach is called content clustering. It focuses on building content around themes that are important to the business and audience searching for the information.
It’s important to remember that you need to uncover real problems from real customers. Brendan Hufford from SEO for the Rest of Us recommends thinking about "what has come up, unprompted, three or more times on your recent calls?" He goes on to say that we need to talk to our customers more to understand their questions whenever possible.
While I fully agree with Brendan, sometimes I have trouble getting in contact with my clients. In these situations, I like to use the Ranking Keywords research tool in Moz Pro to discover hidden needs, questions, and content gaps in the market.
I'm interested in building a topical cluster about "content marketing ideation" (I know, meta, right?) I want to see articles similar to one of an existing authority piece from Moz.
I fire up the Ranking Keywords tool and enter the URL in the top field, along with two competitor URLs in the bottom fields. Once I compare the sites, I'll see a Venn diagram that shows unique keywords in the URLs:
Since Moz is an established site, I'm looking for areas without the blue overlap (in this scenario, the largest blue circle represents moz.com keywords).
This information will show me keywords and themes that I'm missing that competitors have. I can use this information in several ways:
Optimize content: I can optimize other articles or posts based on the theme cluster of choice and the overall spread and coverage of keywords against my competitors.
Competitor overlap: I can look at the overlap between the competitors that don't include keywords from Moz. This information can show practical terms that my articles are missing, but the competition has if I want to expand my market reach.
Individual competitor terms: The fringe areas for competitors that don't overlap are a great place to understand a competitor's strength in the market. You can examine these to find gold nuggets and content ideas with little competition and significantly impact your content success.
As you can see, the visual layout of overlapping keywords is a great place to start the ideation process. While it’s not the end-all solution to content marketing, it is a powerful tool to get a 5,000-foot view of the keyword landscape around a topic. This information can guide content optimization or content production as needed based on competitor content around the same theme.
2. Keyword realignment for existing content
When most people think of content marketing, they think of creating new blog posts, infographics, and e-books. But the truth is that some of your best results come from optimizing existing content.
I like to use the table feature within Moz Pro's Ranking Keywords section to find opportunities quickly. For example, if I continue with the above scenario to find content for "content marketing ideation tips," we'll see Moz Pro return valuable data from competitors:
I filter data right in the Moz interface (so fresh and so clean!). The goal here is to find content ideas that the competitors are outranking Moz for with the intent to optimize what we already have. Here are some tips to make this as efficient as possible:
Click on the sorting feature above each competitor to find ideas that outrank your content.
Filter a competitor's "US Rank" column from smallest to largest.
Once filtered, look at which terms competitors outrank your site for.
Prioritize high search volume with relatively low difficulty scores. Content themes with more incredible difficulty might need content hubs.
I write these ideas down and organize them in a spreadsheet to determine whether I should create fresh content based on search volume and difficulty or expand existing content to improve the breadth of information provided to my readers.
3. Find questions for your brand
At the heart of content marketing is the process of discovering what people are asking online. If you have an established brand like Moz, it can be easy to overlook the basics of what people ask about your brand.
Assuming that you have a unique brand name like Moz, you can quickly find questions people ask with Moz Pro's Keyword Suggestion feature. On the other hand, while the band Tool is well-established and well-known, they might have a difficult time finding questions for their brand due to the generic nature of their name.
All this is to say that you'll need to balance results with how specific your brand name is. Queries that are too generic may not generate helpful results.
This approach to content ideation aims to see what people ask about Moz and if the Moz site sufficiently answers those questions.
In the above example, some excellent questions emerge that could be included on an FAQ page or added to various pages to enhance the user experience overall.
While finding questions for your brand won't net you awesome skyscraper content ideas, they're essential to keep your brand strong and ensure that you control the narrative around your brand.
BONUS IDEA: Use some of these questions to inform FAQ schema and other interactive content ideas for people looking for your brand by name.
4. Using Artificial Intelligence to Create Content
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being used in the content marketing world to generate more content ideas. Tools such as ChatGPT allow content creators to plan content more easily. If you intend on using AI to create content, be careful. Search engines like to rank content that is valuable and unique, and generative AI is not unique. Make sure to use these suggestions by making it your own, and develop content around AI - don't just copy and paste. Learn more about how to use AI in your content strategy with Ross Simmond's Whiteboard Friday - How Content Is Evolving Thanks to AI.
Content ideation made simple
There's no two ways around it: content ideation is difficult. It can be even harder if you serve clients in different industries — your hard-won research won’t apply to other content pieces. However, you can make the process more efficient (and even fun, may I say?) by using the powerful tools offered in the Moz Pro toolkit.
I love using the various tools to find content gaps, reverse-engineer my competitors' strategies, and find branded questions that my clients can use for their content. All of these tactics can lead to a nice bump in traffic and, over time, can result in qualified clicks and conversions!
Find better content ideas with Moz Pro
Now that you have a handy blueprint for uncovering lucrative content ideas using Moz Pro, put your new knowledge to use with the help of a free 30-day trial:
