A Blogger’s Cheatsheet for Generating Topic Ideas Through Effective Search

This is a story about a copywriter. It could be any copywriter. Say, his name is Rylan. He loves working on interesting briefs and writes amazing copies.

Once upon a time, Rylan was writing posts on “Garden Furniture”. For one year it went on smoothly, with Rylan using old school techniques such as searching for topics on Google News and Google Alerts. He was at peace with the world till, after about a year, he ran out of topics. Like a dead man grasping for straws he went on to use Bing and Yahoo but they weren’t too helpful either.  He even tried Baidu and Yandex but to no avail. He thought and thought and could not come up with anything. He even tried a nature trail and meditation for divine intervention but to no avail.

Finally he asked his friend from SEO to help him out in such a situation. No prizes for guessing: it was me (Aditya).

We came up with some solutions to help Rylan in this situation. Following are some of the solutions to Rylan’s dilemma:

1. Search for Topics on specific websites:

Suppose Rylan is searching for a trending topic on “sofa cushions”, he could use a popular website as his reference point and use the following search query “sofa cushions site:www.habitat.co.uk” to be used across browsers. What this would do is help him get the best topics for sofa cushions on habitat.co.uk.

2. Topical Search:

In case there is a particular topic that Rylan would be interested in, such as “Difference between rattan and wicker”, he can search for inurl:Difference between rattan and wicker. This will render search results that have the topic “Difference between rattan and wicker” present in the URL. See the results for yourself:

Rylan can use this to find websites he can use to search for topics. (Refer to the first solution)

3. Keyword you are looking for:

Rylan is really upset now. He believes that all the solutions that have been suggested to him until now do not have a social angle to it, which could have help him to find relevant competitors, who are also in the same field. Therefore, I (Aditya) suggest a solution to solve that problem as well. Rylan can use “site:facebook.com inurl:garden furniture” to search for topics and Facebook Business pages to understand what others are doing.

These are the 3 solutions I gave Rylan and he hasn’t bothered me since then. So I assume these have been helpful to Rylan, the copywriter. In the end, all my copywriter friends, we are only using Google smartly to our benefit.

P.S: The entire story is a figment of my imagination and is not a real life situation.