Google’s “Content Ideas” is Useful for Fleshing Out your Niche

This morning, I got an email from Google about their new, experimental “Content Ideas” tool on the Google Search Console. Here’s a screenshot:

Clicking the link, I saw this report:

You can see a new “Content ideas” link on the right-hand side of the Google Search Console. This will appear only if Google has selected your site. More on that below.

On my website www.bhagwad.com, I have an article on why I thought Don Corleone was a better don than his son Michael, and it’s one of the more popular articles on my small blog. So we see that Google has picked up the topic “Vito Corleone” and is suggesting topics for which it thinks my blog can rank well.

Google “Content Ideas” are Great for Exploring Topics

It’s clear that Google views sites as “associated” with specific topics and is trying to get you to create content that it considers underserved. These are probably topics people are searching for but don’t generate results that Google considers good enough.

It’s a fantastic opportunity to exploit because these suggestions are visible only to you and come straight from the horse’s mouth.

These Topics Don’t Show on Keyword Tools

The topics in Google’s “Content Ideas” tool are invisible to keyword tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush. So this is privileged information that Google provides to you and you alone. There’s no keyword volume information, so you can’t tell in advance what kind of traffic you receive.

But if you’re having trouble finding topics to write about, the content ideas provide a ready-made list to work on.

Content Ideas are for Informational – Not Commercial Content

Unfortunately, only one of my sites received the invitation for content ideas, and it happens to be the one that doesn’t have any monetization goals. It’s a personal blog, and the topics are relatively unexplored. I don’t think Google will be as generous with these content ideas for well-explored niches that generate high buyer intent.

For example, WP-Tweaks.com deals with web hosting, for which every branch and sub-branch is saturated with content. I highly doubt that Google will give us a helping hand by suggesting ideas for such topics.

A Long-Tailed Keyword Bonanza

There are thousands of articles with ideas on finding long-tailed keywords that are underserved and for which your site can rank well. With Content Ideas, it seems that Google has done the research for you and is telling you outright which keywords you can rank for.

This tool is a godsend if your goal is to improve site engagement and get more eyeballs. Next to each topic, there’s a “More” button that further expands the content ideas, and you can choose which ones to start working on immediately.

How to Generate more Topic Ideas

Google’s Content Ideas keyword tool starts with a limited set of topics. However, you can add more topics to the list by clicking the “Search all topics” label. For example, if I want to get topic ideas about gold, then I type “Gold” into the search bar, and it lets me choose the topics from the list like this:

You can see that it’s not a simple keyword-based search because there’s a separate topic for gold as metal and gold as a color. Each of these will provide different content ideas.

Future Improvements – Search Volume

The Content Ideas tool may include the search volume in the future so we can prioritize the massive number of topic ideas. On the other hand, Google might choose to withhold that information deliberately so the topics aren’t over-optimized by everyone targeting only the most popular keywords.

After all, if the purpose is to suggest content about which people aren’t writing enough, then providing search volumes can be counterproductive.