It’s common for businesses to run out of ideas for content – topics for articles, information to put directly into a social media post or even data to create an infographic are all things that leave people staring at a blank screen. A great place to get the creative juices flowing are these three content marketing tools you can find online. These will not only give you ideas, they will help you explore the popularity of topics and indicate the extent to which they will achieve your organic SEO goals. 

Below is an overview of each…hopefully you will make use of them next time you are scratching your head and wondering where to start!

1. Answer the public
   This is a free tool (although limited to two searches per day). After inputting which country your search relates to, you simply enter a keyword relating to your topic. In my example I entered the word “cat” and it presents a few different dimensions for results. Shown in the left-hand image above are all the questions that relate to the topic generated from popular internet searches. If that is not enough to spark a content idea, you can also look at a high-level list of related terms or an alphabetical list of related terms (no surprise to find “cats youtube funny” in that list, given that cat videos are one of the most popular items on YouTube!).
   
2. Google Trends
   To validate that your content idea is popular enough, you could use the Google Trends tool to find out what volume of searches on that topic have been made over a specified timeframe. After you have selected which country you are analysing, you can look at just general web search volumes or at YouTube, Google Shopping, News search or Image searches. And then it may help to compare that topic to another idea you have. If relevant, you can also analyse the results by region as your own audience may have a particularly strong geographic profile. 
   
   As you can see from the right-hand image above, ‘cats’ compared with ‘dogs’ on YouTube searches confirms the relative popularity of cats on that platform! It also brings up some interesting regional results, with cats being of particular interest in West Coast and Malborough and dogs being of more interest in Northland. When you compare popularity of cats and dogs on a general web search, the overall results are reversed, with the interest in dogs far outweighing cats – in many regions by 2:1.
   
3. Ahrefs Keyword Generator
   Another free online marketing tool that is similar to Googles keyword planner tool available through Google Ads, with the convenience of not needing to login – simply bookmark it and it’s ready to go! There is some overlap between this and the other two tools mentioned above because they already indicate the popularity of a topic, however this one is more specific in terms of estimated search volumes for each keyword per month. It also gives a KD score, this is like Google’s “competition” score – this lets you know the “keyword difficulty” score for how hard it is to rank in the top 10 organic search results for each word by assessing the level of competition for that keyword (scores are out of 100, with 0 being easy and 100 difficult). You will typically find that broader keywords are more difficult to get good organic results with. Using the earlier example of ‘cats’ – there are 14,000 searches for this general term per month in NZ and it scores a 76 for difficulty, whereas ‘cartoon cats’ although a lower search volume of 4,400 searches per month, it scores a much easier 8 for the likelihood of being able to place in the top 10 organic results. 
   
   If you are in an industry that is a popular search on the internet, rather than competing with the big fish who are likely paying huge sums for Google Adwords ads to be displayed for competitive broad terms, why not choose a specific industry related search term that still gets a decent number of searches, but offers a much better chance of a high organic ranking.

Still stuck and need some help with planning content that is a great fit for your digital marketing goals? Get in touch to explore how we could help.