You might have heard the saying “content is king” when you’ve been looking for new ways to market your business. Well, it’s true. Creating good high-quality content is a great way to; attract new visitors to your website, the perfect opportunity to target new or long tail keywords, and it shows that you know what you’re talking about.

This is all well and good but coming up with a new blog article can be a struggle. Most small businesses aim to publish blog articles 1-10 times per month which can be used on their website, email newsletters, social media channels or a video script. When you’re publishing content on a regular basis it’s easy to burn through ideas quickly.

We’re going to help you never worry about thinking of a new blog article again and set you on the path of being a content producing machine. But first of all what makes a good blog article?

What Makes a Good Blog Article?

Before we start you need to know the importance of a good blog article. If you have a search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy your blog articles should support this by targeting long tail keywords and linking to relevant content. If you don’t have an SEO strategy you might be creating supporting content without even realising that you’re doing it, which is a bonus, but ideally, it would be good to track the results.

Good blog articles generally follow these basic rules…

- They should answer common and valuable questions.

- They should focus on your target audience’s buyer intent.

- There should be sufficient organic search traffic or a hot industry topic.

Ok, let’s get into it.

Google Auto Suggest

Google is the number one search engine in the world and the starting point for many people’s session on the internet. To get some quick blog article ideas just start typing a question or keyword in the Google search bar and Google will start to show you suggestions based on popular searches.

This is a quick and easy method to get a new blog article ideas and results will vary, but we’ll show you how to supercharge this!

Answer The Public

Answer The Public is the supercharged version of using Google auto suggest. Answer The Public uses Google’s and Bing’s auto suggest data and gives you an aggregated view of the questions and therefore an insight into the motivations and emotions of the people searching for that particular keyword.

Don’t be put off by the old man in the jumper, this is a great free resource for getting a couple of months worth of blog article ideas.

To get started simply type in keyword or phrase and hit “get questions”. The results page will show a beautiful visualisation of all the auto suggest results that are split into the following categories…

- Questions

- Prepositions

- Comparisons

- Alphabeticals

- Related

To view the results better switch the view to “data” or download to a spreadsheet. The results gained from this website should give you some great ideas for your next blog and because the data is based on auto suggest results, you know that people are actively searching for answers to these questions.

Hubspot Blog Generator

We’ve just come across the Hubspot Blog Generator and if you want some quick and easy blog post ideas then this is worth a look at. The process is quite straight forward, you have the option of entering up to 3 nouns and these will form the base of your results.

Clicking on “give me blog ideas” will generate 5 blog ideas and you can enter more details to get more ideas. After testing this tool a few times the ideas seem to be similar regardless of the nouns entered but at least it’s a start to get you thinking.

It’s worth noting that the results are not based on auto suggest data or search data, so these types of blogs would be better suited for sharing on social media rather than increasing inbound traffic.

Moz Keyword Explorer

Now we’re heading into pro territory. Moz is an SEO software used widely in the industry and they have a great tool – Keyword Explorer. For free you can enter 2 queries per day or you can opt for a 30-day free trial if you want to dig a little deeper.

To get started you’ll need to enter your keyword in the field and change the country to the relevant one. Click on the search button and it will give you a keyword overview, showing monthly search volume, suggestions and SERP (search engine ranking page) analysis. What we’re interested in are the keyword suggestions.

For blog article ideas you need to change “include a mix of sources” to “are questions”. Change the order the monthly volume column and this will now show all the questions related to your keyword with the monthly searches in descending order, giving you blog post ideas with a known monthly search volume.

It’s worth noting that “no data” means that the data for that keyword isn’t in the Moz database, so the search volume isn’t displayed. However, because it’s present in the list it means that people are actively searching that question in Google.

Bonus Tip

Whilst you’re using Moz you might as well do some keyword research and check that you’re targeting the correct keywords on your website. The monthly search volume column shows how many people are searching in Google for that particular keyword. This is a great insight if you’ve never seen this data before.

Hot Industry Trends

Sometimes you don’t need to know the monthly search volume or use blog idea generators, you can rely on what’s happening in your industry. If there is a hot industry trend/topic e.g. a new technique in web design, a new product launch or discovery in your industry, then this will make a great blog post.

Strike whilst the iron is hot and show your audience that you’re knowledgeable about your industry. Not only will this increase your audience’s trust but show that you actively keep up to date with news and care about your work.

What Next?

Creating new content on a regular basis is a great way to keep your website fresh and attract new visitors to your website and plays an important role in SEO. If you’d like to discuss which keywords you should be targeting to attract the right audience and your overall SEO strategy, please get in touch.

Email hello@mechanised.co.uk or call 0161 791 0100 if you’d like to know more about our SEO services.