5 Quick Ways to Find Blog Topics & Content Ideas That Boost SEO

Staring at a blank computer screen thinking of SEO blog topics and drawing a blank?

It happens to all of us!

To boost content marketing and SEO, and to rank high in Google organically (not with ads), you need to continuously find fresh SEO blog topics to keep your audience engaged.

But what to blog about?

You will find lots of online sources suggesting hundreds of ways how to come up with content ideas. They are fantastic ways to find original content ideas, sure, but with 2 challenges:

• They work only if you have a lot of time. Which is always a challenge we small business owners face.
• These methods are not always data-driven. So you might find some topics to blog about, but maybe there is not enough demand for these topics, or they are so popular, that it is almost impossible to rank high in Google for that, with your small business website.

So in this post, we will do it a bit differently.

In this post I will show you, with lots of examples, how to find engaging blog topics to write about, with a focus on 2 key aspects:

• Find blog post ideas specific to your niche that are more likely to help you improve search engine positions.
• Find hundreds of these blog ideas quickly, usually within one hour.

What are SEO blog topics?

SEO blog topics are content ideas for your blog that have the potential to rank high in search engine results pages.

SEO content can help get your website noticed by search engines and drive traffic and conversions.

But it can be tricky to figure out SEO blog topics that you can write about.

It’s important to research relevant terms related to your business and industry that your audience is searching for.

You need to then use these SEO content ideas effectively with original content that will stand out.

Why do you need SEO blog topics and content ideas?

SEO-friendly blog topics are essential for a successful custom SEO strategy and can be one of your fundamental website goals.

Using SEO content ideas for your blog helps your audience find your brand and website, visit it, engage with it, and eventually buy from you.

Here are 5 reasons why you should SEO blog topics on your website.

1. Get better rankings

One of the primary benefits of optimizing your blog topics for SEO is search engine positioning, which is improving your website’s rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs).

2. Get more visibility and traffic

The second benefit of using SEO content ideas is that when your website appears in high positions in the SERP, it gets your website noticed by your audience.

More people will be able to find and read your content.

3. Drive more engagement

Optimizing your blog topics for SEO can also lead to more engagement with your content.

When people are able to find your content easily, they are more likely to read it and interact with it.

4. Gain trust

Appearing higher in SERPs can help to build trust with potential visitors.

When a branded website appears higher in results, people are more likely to believe that the brand is more relevant and authoritative than one that appears lower down.

5. Increase your ROI

Using SEO-friendly blog topics can help to improve your return on investment (ROI).

If you are hiring content writers to create your blog posts, then you need your blog topics to get noticed and people to visit your website.

Even if you are writing your blog posts yourself, it is still time you are investing, time that could be spent making money.

So in your content marketing, it is key to prioritize SEO blog topics.

Tools you need to find SEO content ideas

The most important tool you need to find SEO blog topics and content ideas is proper keyword research or SEO tool.

I would definitely recommend Semrush as in my experience they have the most accurate data and lots of useful tools for any level of experience. Check out my Semrush review to see why I love Semrush..

You can get an extended 30-day free trial exclusively with this link to see if it suits you (their usual trial period is 7 days).

Tools like SE Ranking, KWFinder and Ubersuggest may be cheaper, but they don’t have as big a database of information like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz.

The process of filtering out topics to get very specific ones suited for you is also a bit limited.

If you’re not convinced, try starting with a free trial of Semrush, SE Ranking, and KWFinder, and see the difference in the data when you follow the process in this post.

What are the criteria for finding high-potential SEO-friendly blog topics?

An SEO tool will give you lots of data on topics.

The key metrics you need to focus on, at least in the beginning, are the volumes/ keyword difficulty/ page traffic.

In a tool like Semrush, some metrics would be:

• Volume of 80+
• Keyword Difficulty < 30% (< 20% is even better)
• Competitor and other reference pages with high traffic
• Long-tail keywords (keywords with 3 or more words)
• Question-type keywords

How to find SEO content ideas in 3 steps

You can find SEO blog topics and content ideas in 3 steps:

• Conduct blog topic research with your SEO tool
• Filter and narrow down the ideas that match your specific brand story and business offer.
• Filter the ideas for SEO (find the ones with high-ranking potential).

Now that you know the basic steps, we will see how we can conduct blog topic research and then filter them down to find blog topics that can improve your SEO.

5 quick ways to find SEO blog topics and content ideas

You can find SEO content ideas very quickly with any SEO tool using 5 different methods:

• Keyword Research
• Semrush Topic Research
• Competition Research
• Research high-authority domains
• Research community sites

I will show you how to do these steps using Semrush, but you can use any SEO tool of your choice.

1. Keyword Research

Let’s say you are a small business selling children’s books. And you want to find SEO blog topics related to this niche.

Step 1: Log in to Semrush.

If you don’t have an account yet, you can get a 30-day free trial.

Step 2: Enter your topic niche.

You have to start with the broad topic of your expertise, so you can find SEO content ideas under that topic.

Go to SEO -> SEO Dashboard -> Keyword Magic Tool.

Enter your niche (in this case, children’s books). Choose a country (I chose the United States).

I get 35,832 keywords grouped into topics shown on the left.

All of these could be your SEO blog topics and content ideas.

So for example, best children’s books, children’s picture books, children’s book illustrator, and so on.

Step 4: Filter topics to match your brand

Even though there are plenty of topics related to children’s books, not all of them may be suited to you and your brand story.

You see many of the blog topics are about self-publishing, writing, and illustrating books.

These are not relevant for you as in this example your business is about selling the books, not creating them or advising people how to make them.

So you need to exclude these topics from your search.

Click on Exclude Keywords.

Scroll through the left section, to find all the words not relevant to you. Write them in the Exclude Keywords box and click on Apply.

In this case, I filtered out the words: write, writing, publishing, illustrator, make, sell, create, manuscript, agent, copyright, and donate.

Now the list has narrowed down to 33,543 from 35,832.

And they are more relevant for the niche of selling children’s books, not making them.

You can filter out more keywords, to narrow down the list even further.

Step 5: Filter topics to match search intent

The blog topics you create content on should match the type of information your audience is looking for.

There are 4 kinds of search intent:

• Informational: Get general information on a topic
• Commercial: Get information to evaluate a product/ service with the intent to buy
• Transactional: Get information on purchasing a product
• Navigational: Keywords to find a brand or business

Keywords with commercial or transactional intent are also called high-intent keywords.

One of the best features of Semrush in keyword research is the Semrush intent column.

So instead of wondering which types of keywords and topics relate to which type of information need, you can simply choose the search intent with a filter.

In the results above, you see that the first few topics have a commercial intent (marked with a C).

People who are looking for these topics are considering buying children’s books.

Some of these topics are:

• best children’s books
• popular children’s books
• classic children’s books

These could be some blog topics you want to create content on if that matches your content strategy.

On the other hand, you could decide to also create content on informational keywords.

Then you go to the Intent column and choose Informational.

There are only 637 keywords. Next to all the keywords you see an I (Informational)

Now you see the topics have changed to:

• children’s books diversity
• children’s book characters
• inappropriate children’s books

On the left, as well, you see the topics are different.

You can also do this with transactional or navigational topics.

Step 6: Filter by SEO potential

In the last part, you can filter your blog topics by the demand and ranking potential.

If you are not a mega website, you will most likely find it hard to rank for topics that have a lot of competition.

So as mentioned before, look for low-difficulty topics, yet with high volume.

You can choose to do this for any search intent, or all of them.

In this example, let’s I want to target all kinds of search intent and SEO blog topics related to them.

So I clear the Intent filter and apply the Volume and KD filters.

Now I see the keywords have been reduced to just 430, with plenty of SEO blog topics:

• fish children’s book
• frog children’s book
• russian children’s book

You can click on the column headers to show the data in ascending or descending format.

And now you have a list of relevant blog topics that could boost your SEO.

Step 6: Export your data

Click on Export on the top right of the table and all the data will be downloaded in an Excel file.

If you find only a few topics relevant to you, and you don’t want to download all the data, then you can use the Keyword Manager feature to just select the few that you like.

• Go to SEO Dashboard -> Keyword Manager.
• Create a new list.
• When you like a keyword in your list of results, just click the ‘+’ button to the left of the keyword, and choose the list you want to add it to.
• When you’re done selecting all your ideas and adding them to the list, just go to the Keyword Manager and download your list of cherry-picked keywords.

Sometimes the topic you have in mind is so vague that SemRush or any other SEO tool doesn’t have any related search results to display.

Or it is a huge sentence and if you enter it in an SEO tool, it comes up empty.

But you know what you mean. And usually, so will Google.

For example, let’s say you are a tax and accounting firm.

You know your audience wants to get maximum tax benefits whenever possible. So you want to center your content around this topic.

You think they may be searching for “tax refund for business owners”.

So enter that in Keyword Overview, but Semrush comes up empty.

Google to the rescue!

Step 1: Google your topics

Enter your broad topic in Google. Note that topics like ‘tax’ are country-specific.

See the top 10 results. See how they focus mostly on small business owners.

Step 2: Copy the URL

Take any page in the results you think is relevant, and copy the URL.

Step 3: Check the ranking keywords

Go to SEO -> SEO Dashboard -> Organic Research.

Enter the URL of the page to see which keywords it ranks for.

Note: Remember to click on Exact URL, and not Root Domain, to see the results for the specific page.

I chose the URL from lendingtree.com.

Now there is a list of 420 keywords that the page ranks for, from which I could select potential SEO blog topics.

Click on Keywords to see the entire list.

You already see many keywords which could be your SEO blog post topics.

For example, filing taxes for small businesses in Canada, tax refund marketing ideas, and the average LLC tax rate.

You can also see many question-type keywords, which you could use for your blog posts under those topics.

Step 4: Filter your results

Apply the advanced filters again as you did above.

The menu here looks a bit different, but the principle is the same. You can include and exclude keywords, volume, KD, etc.

Step 5: Export the data

You can use Keyword Manager to save the keywords you need or export your data to get all the SEO blog topics.

Step 5: Repeat

Repeat the whole process for any other URL you found in your Google search.

You will see almost the same search results that you can see in an SEO tool for the US.

2. Topic Research (only in Semrush)

Semrush Guru includes a Topic Research feature that makes it very convenient to find SEO blog topics.

I won’t delve into this in too much detail here as I have already covered it in my full post on the Semrush content tool.

To get started, sign up for a 30-day free trial of Semrush Guru (you will need to enter your credit card details).

In the Semrush dashboard, go to Content Marketing -> Topic Research.

In Content Ideas, enter your topic.

Let’s enter the same broad topic as before: children’s books.

The Semrush Topic Research tool suggests topics in 4 different formats:

1. Cards
2. Explorer
3. Overview
4. Mind Map

I prefer the Cards and Mind Map the most because of the data presentation, but the Explorer and Overview features are also quite relevant and helpful.

For children’s books, these are the topics you see under Cards:

• Harry Potter
• Picture books
• Reading level
• Children’s books online

As you can see, the topics are very different from each other, and are also very different from the topics we find in the Keyword Research process above.

Which is great, right? More ways to find content ideas for SEO!

Under each blog topic in Cards, you also see ideas for specific blog posts.

On the other hand, this is what the Mind Map looks like for the same broad topic.

While some topics are similar to the ones in Cards, there are also different ones.

The Mind Map and Overview sections also provide insights into questions that people are asking on the same broad topic.

You can toggle between the 4 different sections to find SEO blog topics that match your brand and content strategy.

.3. Competitor Research

A great way to find SEO blog topics and content ideas is to analyze your competitor’s content.

There are 2 ways of getting ideas:

• Analyze their best-performing content
• Analyze the keyword gap

3.1. Analyze their best-performing content

In Semrush, go to SEO -> SEO Dashboard -> Organic Research.

Enter the domain name. I entered a real estate website: redfin.com

Click on Pages.

Now you have a list of their pages, by default, ranked in descending order by the traffic they receive.

The higher the traffic, chances are, the more popular the topic, and the better-optimized the post is, for relevant keywords.

I already see a potential topic: what-is-contingent-vs-pending. Or even, home-worth.

Export the list of all these pages, to find topic ideas that you can use.

If you click on each URL, like in URL Research, you will see all the keywords that the page ranks for.

Then you can filter them again, like in  Keywords Research (Step 4) above, and follow the steps, to get additional, very specific ideas from each page.

3.2. Analyze the Keyword Gap

In this method, we analyze which keywords your competition websites rank for, and you don’t. Or where your ranks are different.

Step 1: Choose competitor domains

Go to SEO -> Keyword Gap.

Enter your domain and up to 4 competition ones. Select the country.

To find SEO blog topics with the Keyword Gap Tool, I entered all the domains I found from the Competitive Positioning Map.

Since you want to know the more popular topics, you can filter them down to competition positions in the Top 20. i.e., for which keywords do these competitor sites rank in the top 20 of Google?

You can also choose custom positions, like 10 – 20, 1 – 30, etc.

You can filter down your content topics further by including other advanced filters as applicable.

It could include volume, KD, even the actual keyword, etc.

Now in the results, see the tab ‘Missing’. These are keywords that your competitors rank for, and you don’t.

You can research these keywords like in the above process of Keyword Research, to get SEO content ideas.

You can also look at the other tabs (besides Missing) to see where your competitors rank better than you.

Competitor Research is thus a great way get inspiration for more SEO blog topics that have high potential.

4. Analyze high-authority domains

You may be a small business, but there are possibly big players in your niche. Every industry would have some.

You can also find content ideas for SEO from them.

The first few steps are the same as in Competitor Research above.

Take a high-authority company website and like in Competition Research, enter it in Organic Research.

In my industry of content marketing and SEO, Semrush is a big one, that publishes loads of content. So I will take that as an example.

Go to Pages.

This report will include everything on the Semrush website, including products, pricing, etc., but I mostly want to know about SEO blog topics.

I see that most of their URLs contain the subfolder ‘blog’.

So I run an advanced filter of Include Keyword Containing ‘blog’ -> Apply.

Now I have a list of their blog/ content pages and the traffic they receive.

These top-performing pages can provide inspiration for SEO blog topics.

Remember to dig deeper into each page’s keywords to find additional content ideas.

5. Get ideas from community sites

When you Google how to find content ideas, many websites will tell you how you can use Reddit or Quora to find ideas. Usually, this process will take hours if you hunt on the website directly.

This is how you can do it quickly, instead of spending hours going through each of those sites. The process is very similar to competition research or high-authority domain research.

Enter quora.com or reddit.com in SEO-> SEO Dashboard -> Organic Research, go to Pages.

Let’s say you own a bakery or make cakes from home. And you want to know what people are asking about cakes.

Filter by URL containing ‘cake’.

Now you have a ton of questions that people are asking on that topic.

Like in the methods above, you can dig deeper into the keywords of each page to find SEO content ideas.

Bonus for service professionals:

If you are a service provider, then you know that many people want to learn about a subject online. And there are loads of courses already available.

A look at popular courses should tell you what people are interested in knowing about most. There are lots of course websites, but we can start with a popular one, like Udemy.

Enter udemy.com in Organic Research, and go to Pages.

You will see all the URLs, including topic pages, specific courses, and other pages.

In Advanced Filters, include URL containing ‘topic’ OR ‘courses’.

Step 3: Filter it further by niche. Let’s say you are a design studio, working on all kinds of designs.

You can also add a condition in Advanced Filters, with Include URL Containing ‘design’.

What is the difference between researching content topics and keywords?

The objective of content topic research is to understand what questions people are asking, and what information they want, so you can create your digital content strategy and get content ideas that can boost your SEO.

Keyword research is the process to identify all the primary and related keywords you should use when you create content based on your content ideas, to optimize your site and page for SEO.

Let’s see this with an example.

When we searched for children’s books in the Semrush Keyword Magic Tool, we found one topic to be ‘children’s book characters’.

Now let’s enter this blog topic in the Semrush Keyword Magic Tool.

Then we find more specific long-tail keywords like:

• popular children’s book characters
• classic children’s book characters
• female children’s book characters

These could be ideas for your specific blog posts.

Can I use free blog topic research tools to find SEO blog topics?

You can use free tools like Google (Related Searches, People Also Ask), Answer The Public, to get content marketing ideas at any time.

Pros of using free topic research tools:

• They are free.
• They give you an idea of what people are asking and related searches.

Cons of using free topic research tools:

• It takes a lot of time to collect keywords and filter them exactly the way you need.
• These tools don’t give you the data and metrics you need to determine the potential of reaching high SERPs.

How to find SEO content ideas and blog topics – Concluding tips

Finding new and original SEO content ideas and blog topics need not always be time-consuming.

The 5 ways I have mentioned will help you find blog topics within hours.

After you’ve found some ideas to start with, you need to start creating content.

Here are 3 tips to keep in mind.

1. Write your unique perspective in your blog posts

It’s great to get content ideas from other sources.

But make sure that the actual content of your post showcases your thoughts and helps your particular audience in the way they need most.

2. Create optimized content

After you’ve chosen a blog topic, ensure that you create SEO-friendly blog posts by using high-potential long-tail and semantic keywords that are relevant to the topic.

This will help you build topical authority.

Don’t forget to do internal linking between your posts. Link Whisper is a fantastic tool to help you build internal links fast.

Use a keyword research checklist to track all the keywords to use in your content, and use them in your website content template.

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3. Use data continuously

To know more about your topic before you write it, research the pages that rank in the top SERPs for it, and analyze what could be its ranking factors (backlinks/ keywords, etc.).

Use data from SEO tools and your audience analysis to guide your content research and creation.

How do you find ideas on what to blog about? Would love to hear your thoughts and experiences. Leave a comment!