Content still stands strong as one of the best ways to build up your website. Without high quality content, your site will struggle to find relevant search traffic and, in turn, generate sales. Many SEO copywriters eventually fall into a pit of confusion when writing blog posts for various clients. Research into the industry always unveils a few more great topics and can hold you for quite a while, but eventually it becomes a struggle and old ideas become rewrites. Finding blog topic ideas can be difficult for some niches, but take my word for it: there are always more topics. You just have to find them, and here’s how.
For example purposes, I’m going to search for topics around air conditioning installation and repair and see what comes up.
Crawling the Web for Ideas…Automatically
Although they don’t randomly generate ideas for you, some of these content idea generator websites can give you an idea of what to write about. I’ve used some in the past and they can give more insight than just an idea to write on. They can provide insight to what makes a topic more likely to be shared, linked to, and commented on. My favorite of all of these content crawlers is Buzzsumo:
Once signed in, you can type in your niche, a general topic, or even a domain that always produces successful content. As you can see by the filters on the left, you can weed out those that you don’t care for at this time. For my purposes, I’m looking for just straight-up articles, so I’ll filter it accordingly:
By default, Buzzsumo sorts the ideas by “total shares”, which can be extremely useful. With some creative thinking, you can likely come up with a good number of ideas just from the first page alone.
The first and third ideas jumped out at me. As for the first, a blog post on what was wrong with the air conditioning unit and how that occurs could be a successful idea; however, it is a news-related topic, so it’s time sensitive. The third topic could be a blog idea all in its own: air repair nightmares.
Note: Take a look at these posts and see what made people want to share them, such as the “Air Repair Nightmares” post.
There are other content generation websites that can also be successful, such as Quora. Here’s a broad search for air conditioning in general:
Immediately I have 2 topics that open up a lot of doors, plus the answers to the questions from people in the industry that can provide some great insight.
The Manual Way: Google It
One of the simplest ways to find blog topics is through Google’s suggestions. When you begin typing, suggestions come up with things people have searched. Take advantage of this and see what people are searching and if it’s a viable topic. Most often, people search questions when they want information. I want to answer them. In my case, I typed “why is my air conditioner” and this was what Google suggests:
There are 5 topics right there:
- Why is my air conditioner frozen?
- Why is my air conditioner leaking water?
- Why is my air conditioner making a loud noise?
- Why is my air conditioner blowing warm air?
- Why is my air conditioner blowing out water?
This method doesn’t always generate this many ideas right out of the gate and can take some tweaking, but it’s a simple and easy way to find ideas.
Using Google Some More: Finding Questions to Answer
When people want to know an answer to something they ask Google or they post it on their forums. Forums are one of the best ways to get ideas because they host dozens of ideas in one place, all related to your niche. Finding them is as easy as a Google search:
I changed it up to HVAC forums because air conditioning falls under HVAC and is a broader search; however, the same strategy can work with “air conditioning repair forums:”
I cut off the search as the ads pushed the second result off the screen, but the search was “air conditioning repair forums.” As you can see, the second result gives our previous search’s first result.
HVAC-Talk has a lot of different forums you can look into, but some of them require a membership. We’re not interested in paying for ideas because, quite frankly, that’s a waste of money.
I discovered that I had to register for an account in order to see the threads, so I did. The account was free and the threads began to show up. I navigated into a forum on indoor air quality:
There are a few topics here, but the one with the most views is generally the most informative and useful for our purposes. A topic on dehumidifying your whole house through use of your HVAC system is a nice topic. Investigate the forums and read a few posts to get a few ideas going.
Note: Make sure to use forums that are populated, at least 1,000 posts.
Frequently Asked Questions
As the name implies, FAQs are asked frequently. Most of the time, this means they are also searched. Search for your keyword or niche, followed by “FAQ.” So, I’ll search for “air conditioning repairs FAQ” and see what I get:
Using these, you can find some basic questions that can give you some blog topic ideas. In some cases, the FAQ can be its own blog post, but most often there’s a more in-depth variation of that same question that can also be explained.
That’s News to Me
One final idea, which may or may not work depending on your niche, is to search for news in your industry. It’s best to focus on news topics that are not controversial topics. The news topics can give you other ideas too, but you can also put your input into the issue at hand. Here’s my search for news:
The first result is quite useful, as it talks about news in the industry. New releases of AC units, efficiency of those units, manufacturer price changes, and other useful news for an HVAC company are discussed. It’s also a useful search to better understand the industry you’re dealing with, which will produce higher quality content.
I moved into the site in search of new ideas and navigated to the Residential Market News, which looks like this:
The big article could be an interesting read, but not quite what I was looking for. The second topic on the other hand can be useful. A topic on comparing energy efficient HVAC equipment to the newer energy efficient equipment would work perfectly.
Conclusion
Web content really is king. Finding decent topics can be a difficult task, but putting some time into it can pay off with more than just topic ideas. Reading some of these articles, or pieces of them, can give you valuable insight into the industry. You can find what makes a post go viral. In fact, I use this method to find some high quality sites to post some articles on as well. For example, an article comparing popular units’ specifications to the award-winning units can make for an interesting post on the news website.
There are numerous other ways to find topics online; these are just a handful of favorites. Depending on your industry, one will work better than another. One may not work at all. Do some testing and see what works best for you.
