Are you responsible for creating tons of great content for your company’s blog, social and video channels? One of the biggest challenges content creators face is figuring out what to actually create! While there are a number of great research tools out there, I want to share 3 simple ways to leverage Google and YouTube to find content ideas that your audience is already interested in so you can create content ideas fast.
Video Transcript:
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Like I said in the bumper, we’re going to be talking about how to find content to write about, what should you write about. We know that content is important. Everybody’s been talking about it for years, and now the new thing lately is semantic search, which we’ve known about for years, and natural language processing, which we know it’s something that Google’s been working on for years, but it’s not always easy to find what we should write about. That’s what I hear all the time. It’s like, “What should I read about? What should I write about?”
Well, it’s actually not so much of a mystery. We can use Google, the search engine, as well as YouTube here to help us understand what people are wanting to read or wanting to watch. I’m going to show you a couple quick tips. You may already know these tips, but they’re quick tips that you can use to make sure that you’re writing content people actually want to read and engage with. When you come to YouTube, there’s a lot, obviously, a lot going on now with YouTube. You have YouTube TV, you’ve got just crazy videos. This guy’s got some pretty cool stuff if you want to just waste some time, watch people burn stuff with matches, it looks pretty cool.
But one way you can find what people actually want to read or watch is by using search. I can go up in here, and I’m in marketing, so marketing. One thing, obviously, you can see is Google has something called predictive search. This predictive text is the same as you would find in the search engine. I just type marketing. I’ve got marketing strategies, marketing 101, marketing majors, marketing strategies for small businesses. I’ve already got a couple ideas here of the main themes that I should be targeting.
Now, once I click on one of these, I’m going to see what the content looks like. I’ve got 13. There’s some numbers here. 95% of people ignore Gary V., another list, another list here, another list here. Apparently, the content that’s really popular for marketing strategies are list pieces of content. What I can take from this are, all right, so if I want to write a piece of content or create a video marketing strategy for a small business, I might want to do something here, these listicle pieces. As you see, they’re doing pretty well.
Now, some of these are from people who are well-known in the industry, but it doesn’t mean you can’t also scrape and piggyback off of what they’re doing as well and maybe create something that’s a little newer, a little bit cutting edge here. This one was nine months ago, but most of this other content is actually pretty old, so you could get in there and start creating a piece of content.
Now, that literally took me a couple seconds to do. A lot of people want to go out and make sure that the keywords are there and you do the research. You absolutely should. When it comes to YouTube, I like to use a tool called TubeBuddy, which will help you see if these terms are worth it or not. I’m going to show you here in just a second.
As you can see, I’m in Incognito at the moment, so because I’m in an Incognito it’s not going to have me logged in and stuff. But if I pull over here to my other window, I’ll show you a little bit what TubeBuddy will do. It’ll tell me the search volume. It’ll tell me the searches per month, which is not a ton. This is, overall, this keyword would have poor quality, but as you can see, they’re still getting tons of views here, and I think that has a lot to say about it. You’re not just targeting this long-tail term. This is really a long-tail variant of marketing strategies, which we already saw.
TubeBuddy is a free tool, but to get a lot of this data, you’re going to have to use the paid version. The goal of this video is really not to show you paid ways to do it. It’s to show you the way you can do it using simple YouTube search, simple Google search. As you can see here, when you’re looking at these views, that’s going to help tell you whether or not these are valuable. As you can see too, it’s telling us that lists are really quite popular. I like to do this a lot when I’m looking at content on YouTube and trying to understand what people want to see and the types of content that are going to help them grow their business. Suggestive search is a super awesome thing that you can leverage here in YouTube.
You can also go to the Trendings tab. This isn’t always going to give you what you want. It’s going to show you obviously everything that’s trending, so if you’re trying to be a channel that’s a content provider who’s staying cutting edge, this can be a helpful thing as well, but I think more than anything, you’re going to get more bang for your buck just using the simple search here.
What are some other ways? We’ve got three. We did YouTube suggestive search. Let’s go over to Google for our last two. Not Google Analytics, but Google Parent. Obviously, I’m having a hard time Googling today.
Obviously, just like we talked about in YouTube, so I’m not going to double up on this, but Google also has the suggestive search tool. Again, once you start typing things in, it’s going to start to define a little bit more about what you might be looking for. I’m going to go ahead and hit enter. We’ve already talked about suggestive search. As you can see here, Google is… Sorry, filtering out things. But I type in this word, marketing strategies, and obviously, the search results look a lot different now than they did a couple of years ago. Over here, we’ve got something with the knowledge panel, and over here, we’ve got people also search for books on marketing, marketing strategy from Wikipedia, some images, all really helpful stuff.
Now, what I like to do, the first thing if I’m looking at a term is I’m looking at this over here. I’m looking at what are the books that are being associated. I’m looking at what Wikipedia is saying. I’m looking at the types of images that Google is pulling in and saying that resonate with them when it comes to marketing strategies. Now that I’m creating a piece of content around marketing strategies, I want to look at the top results again. The first one is a top 10 article here by entrepreneur.com.
This is 15 marketing strategies by Inc. Then we’ve got a couple of links here by Investopedia. Again, we’ve got another list content, another list piece of content. Once again, we’re finding that lists are doing really well in Google search, and it’s something that Google is saying usually meets the criteria for the end user when they’re typing in the words “marketing strategies.”
I also like to come down here to see searches related to marketing strategies. Now, what we have here are some other great examples of content. Here’s one that you could do. What are the four basic marketing strategies? You can take something like that and augment it and create a piece of content around it. Four types of marketing, types of marketing, marketing strategy examples. These are all long-tail variants of the term, and they’re also almost written in a sentence way where you can start to create a piece of content, so “15 marketing strategy examples you can leverage today,” right there we can do a piece of content, new blog post for it.
Now we’ve learned about suggestive search, we know that with that is, we know that it works in both Google as well as YouTube, now we also know that searches related to marketing strategies, the related searches at the bottom of the results can be very helpful when we’re trying to come up with topics to write about. Then probably one of the coolest things Google’s done for content providers as well as end users is “people also ask for.” These are questions, direct questions that people are asking and typing in the search results, and they are telling us what people are searching for. You can literally start opening these up and seeing who’s actually filled out and created a piece of content worthy of ranking in here. The more you expand this, the more questions Google starts to give you.
As a content creator, you can start to see, “Here’s questions I should answer.” I can start creating videos or creating PDFs or creating blog posts on what are the seven elements of marketing, what are five marketing concepts, whatever these are. These are questions people are directly typing in, and now I can use these as starters. I can use these websites as ideas of this is the type of content that Google is expecting to rank here.
Do your research. Not every site in here might be worthy of it. They just might be owning it for the time period, but get a basic understanding of the site that is ranking and why is it ranking. Cleverism.com, I don’t know anything about this site, but looking at this piece of content, the four Ps, pretty common here in the marketing world. Mixed piece of content. They’ve got a video. They’ve got steps. They’ve got a number of things going on in this video, in this piece of content. That’s what Google’s expecting to see when you’re answering this question.
But coming up with topics shouldn’t be that hard when we leverage these free tools. Google literally tells us what people want to see. We just have to take the time and get out of our tools sometimes, go to the platform and get a better understanding of what people are typing in and the type of content that Google is ranking so we can start to see what’s expected. This will help us when we’re doing link outreach. It will help us when we’re posting on social, posting on other channels because we’re creating content that people like.
When you do that, you can start to get those links more naturally as a result of that, or you can use other tactics now if you’ve taken this entrepreneur article, and you did 20. You can do something like Brian Dean’s Skyscraper Technique, and then reach out to the people linking there. If you want to learn more about that, just search “skyscraper Brian Dean.” he’ll show you how to do exactly that. But when it comes to titles and when it comes to knowing what to write about, Google’s telling us. Just use the tools available. Use the data that it’s put right in front of us to create the pieces of content that people need.
I hope this made sense. If you’ve got any questions, please let me know. I’d love to continue the conversation online. If there’s any other tools or tricks as well that you’re using to help you create better pieces of content, please share with the community. We’d love to continue that here. Until next time, Happy Marketing.
