How to Find New Content Ideas [Video]

You can come up with new content ideas from 6 sources: FAQ pages in your industry, AnswerThePublic, Pinterest, BuzzSumo, Quora and SEMrush. Thinking up new content ideas is one of the things content creators spend the most time on. Wouldn't it be nice to have a ready supply of topics to draw inspiration from? A ready topic list doubles as an effective route to growing organic traffic on the SEO side.

In this piece you will learn 6 shortcuts for producing new content ideas quickly. Apply them consistently and collect the results in a spreadsheet. You will end up with more inspiration and extra time.

1. Study the FAQ pages in your industry

Studying the frequently asked questions (FAQ) pages in your industry is a short way to learn what your potential customers ask and what they care about. Pick a target keyword for your industry and search Google for:

inurl:faq [keyword]

Open the FAQ pages of the sites that rank, and get to know your customers better.

Using those questions in blog posts and guides turns your website into a genuine resource for your customers.

Why are customer questions a strong source of content ideas?

Customer questions are a strong source of content ideas because they show a need in your audience's own words. Your customers' questions build up in sales calls, the support inbox, product reviews and social media messages. Collect them in one spreadsheet and merge the ones that ask for the same thing. A poll on social media or a reply prompt in your email newsletter asks your audience directly, and the answers give a team brainstorm real questions to start from. My post on reading search intent explains how to read the purpose behind a question.

2. Visualise your topics with AnswerThePublic.com

With AnswerThePublic you can pour your content ideas into templates and enrich them. You will immediately see how much time this tool saves if you have been using Google autocomplete for topic research.

AnswerThePublic breaks your keyword down into the most common questions and prepositions and presents visual maps of those phrases, so you have more to draw on.

The tool can produce alphabetical keyword lists, and you can download everything either as an image or as a spreadsheet. Update (October 2026): AnswerThePublic is now a product of Neil Patel's company NP Digital, and its plans are limited by the number of searches per month.

3. Let Pinterest steer your content

Although Pinterest does not represent your audience demographically, its visual results can be a source of content ideas.

Pinterest suggests more keywords related to your content, which helps you narrow the results down.

4. Find the most-shared content on social networks with BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a content research tool that shows the most-shared content on social networks in your industry.

Search your keyword and you can see what people share most. You can discover the most-shared URLs of the leading companies in your sector.

5. Mine Quora questions for more content ideas

Quora is a huge question-and-answer platform and a valuable source of content ideas. Because both the questions and the answers are written by users, you get to know your audience better. I would suggest researching there for your longer-tail keywords or category content rather than for generic terms.

With Quora's filtering options you can reach topics and blog posts as well as questions.

6. See your competitors' highest-traffic pages with SEMrush

Reaching the pages that bring your competitors the most traffic is exactly what SEMrush does. Update (October 2026): the tool's name is now written Semrush. A competitor's highest-traffic pages are listed in the Pages report of the Organic Rankings tool (previously Organic Research).

To generate, audit and improve ideas for your own content, study your competitors' high-performing pages and feed what you learn into your own content strategy.

These 6 methods will let you build your list of content ideas in less time. Write to me and share your sources if you know of any worth adding to this list.

Which content ideas do Google Trends and Search Console show?

Google Trends shows rising search topics as content ideas, and Search Console shows the queries your site already appears for.

How do you read related searches in Google Trends?

You read related searches in Google Trends at the bottom of the page after you search for a term. According to Google Trends Help, top searches are the terms people search for most with your term in the same session. Rising searches grew most in the selected period, and "Breakout" marks growth of more than 5,000%.

How do Search Console queries turn into content ideas?

Search Console queries turn into content ideas when a query in the Performance report earns impressions but finds no full answer on your site. Expand an existing page when the query matches its intent, and plan a separate post when the intent differs. The report table shows at most 1,000 rows, so I wrote a separate post on exporting Search Console data to BigQuery.

What is a content ideas generator?

A content ideas generator is a tool, such as a prompt in ChatGPT or Gemini, that turns a topic into a list of possible titles and angles. A generator does not see your customers or your search data, so check each idea against Search Console and Google Trends. Google's guidance on generative AI content warns that generating many pages without adding value for users may violate its spam policy on scaled content abuse.

How do you turn content ideas into a content calendar?

You turn content ideas into a content calendar by giving each idea in your spreadsheet a format, a priority and a publishing date. One idea can then feed more than one piece of content, as the three examples below show.

• A step-by-step guide becomes a short YouTube or TikTok video.
• The same guide becomes an email newsletter issue or a podcast episode.
• An old post that has gone out of date returns to the calendar as an update.