Coming up with blog titles and topics can be a struggle. Most small businesses aim to publish blogs 3-10 times a month and then use these blog articles to populate everything from newsletters to conversion funnels. When you publish content on a regular basis it's easy to burn through your initial list of blog titles in a few months. Coming up with good titles also takes a lot of time, and when you work on a team defining what's "good" becomes subjective.
Because regular blogging has such a positive impact on inbound traffic, the process of coming up with ideas shouldn't be a burden. Never worry about blog topics again: I'll show you how to generate 100+ long-tail blog title ideas that include estimates of search volume and competitiveness.
What makes a good blog title?
Before jumping into how to generate 100+ blog topics quickly, let's discuss the importance of having good titles.
I think of blog content development as having two parts: blog articles that form the core of my SEO or inbound marketing strategy, and a backup list of blog ideas I can pull from in a pinch. Both types benefit from having great titles.
Good topics generally follow some basic rules, including:
- Your posts should answer common/valuable questions.
- They should focus on your target buyer's search intent.
- They should tap into sufficient organic traffic to make them worth blogging about.
When it comes to generating a great backup list of blog topics quickly, it can be hard to identify titles that meet those criteria without succumbing to clickbait. There are several blog title generator tools available, but I find that they tend toward clickbait or "catchy" titles that are more useful for paid channels rather than the long-term value expected from organic search.
Some of the more popular blog title generators are:
HubSpot's Blog Topic Generator
Impact's BlogAbout Title Generator
Portent's Content Idea Generator
It should come as no surprise that there's been a backlash against clickbait titles recently.
I recommend against using traditionally clickbait titles since they often result in only one type of beneficial metric: page views. To positively impact both search rank position and on-site conversions you need to focus on valuable content that delivers high engagement measured by things like better-than-average time on page, good page depth, and low bounce rates. Clickbait titles and content generally do not provide this.
A better way to generate
Okay, so let's take a look at a quick way to generate blog titles. Read it, try it, and time it.
- In Moz Pro, navigate to Keyword Explorer and enter in your target keyword. (Even if you don't have a subscription, you can try it free or get Moz Pro free for 30 days.)
- On the Overview page, click on Keyword Suggestions.
- Use the "Display keyword suggestions that" dropdown to select "are questions."
- Here's your list of potential blog titles for your topic. Note: The "Relevancy" column shows how closely the search term matches the initial query you used, and the "Volume" column displays estimates of monthly organic search traffic.
- Access Difficulty and Organic CTR scores for your search queries by selecting all the relevant check boxes and clicking the "Add selected to" drop-down to create or add them to a Keyword List in Moz Pro. (Rand put together a great presentation on how to do this.) In the Keyword List, you're able to view, segment, and sort your blog titles by all the factors available in the Keyword Explorer Overview.
Boom! There you have it. Never hunt for blog titles again. You've created a list you can choose from in a pinch, knowing you have quality titles based on search volume, difficulty, and organic CTR.
See how fast you can create a great list of blog titles!
More tips for professional marketers
As you analyze results from the Keyword Suggestions feature in Keyword Explorer, here are some additional things you can do to learn about your target customers:
Look for trends in the questions people ask. Do most questions center on a specific pain point, such as cost, quality, or ease of use? Consider segmenting your users based on these different pain points and their associated value drivers.
Find the "best question." In your list of blog titles, look for the one question that best aligns with your target customer. Then run a Keyword Explorer query on that question by selecting the magnifying glass icon on the right side of the webpage. Often, these results will display an even longer, more targeted list of questions to choose from.
Hope this helps your blogging efforts! Tell us about your experience using Keyword Explorer to generate targeted blog titles. If you want to keep mastering keywords and blog titles after your Moz Pro free trial ends, check out the Moz Pro Medium subscription.
Great post. I'd also recommend exploring a site called Answer the Public. It's great for drawing out questions about a topic.
Great idea, Stephen. I think combining the two tools would make for some great insights.
For both tools it's amazing what you can discover about people's general questions on a topic. Such as, are they most concerned with price? Quality? Availability? Etc.
By plugging the Answer the Public results into Keyword Explorer (which can be done via .csv upload into a List), you can get some good details on volume and difficulty scores.
Result: Blog title ideas for dayzzzzzzz.
I use this also
Answer the Public works like a charm! KWFinder and FAQ Fox are extremely useful too. ;)
I also use Answer the Public, but it does not have search vol. I was just looking for some free tool providing search volume and bingo. search-term.firebaseapp.com has this data. It's amazing how they get it considering the changes in Google Keyword Planner
Great Combo Stephen. I have tested some of the article blog title generator and the result are hilarious, but Answer the Public and keyword explorer gives and increible array of tittles that make sense.
Hi Brian,
Nice article, it would be really helpful for people to create unique blog ideas.
Thanks again !
Regards,
Vijay
Thanks Vijay!
Also works great for social post titles. The thing I like best about this method is being able to see search volume associated with each option. That can allow a person to prioritize their titles and target those with a good chance og being searched.
Thanks Brian,
I agree, it would work well with social post titles as well, A relevant, meaningful and well composed title is much better than just lick-bait title ideas.
Regards,
Vijay
Good tactic, I'm going to have to replicate the same strategy for my site(s). :)
Not a huge fan on the HubSpot tool. If you throw in the 3-4 different keywords, it seems like the only have 10 modifiers that they can add to your keyword.
I haven't seen the other tools. Thanks for putting together the list!
I've had the same experience. I think many similar tools utilize the same "system." My sense is that many title generator tools are developed as a way of converting a person on their site rather than providing the kinds of high-value topics that can be generated in Keyword Explorer.
I find domain name generators follow the same pattern. I use the Keyword Explorer Suggestions tool for this purpose as well. Doing some analysis around word combinations to come up with moderate volume and low difficulty names helps augment the normal (sometimes discouraging) process of coming up with available domains.
Always useful to get some better blog title ideas!
Went through a similar process to create mine through SEMrush recently, but I found that either it didn't give many long tail keywords about my topic or maybe I just dont not know how to use it correctly.
So helpful. Will have to try this out!
Great article Brian !!! The truth is that it is very useful as it is not always our intention is correct and the use of the tools you mentioned is more likely to find bright ideas and titles
Thanks Luis!
Great article and resources for content creators Brian!
Just wanted to throw in ContentIdeator as well since it's a great inspiration tool for blog titles as it spits out existing high impact blog titles based on social shares for any given keyword.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders and might be biased :)
Hey Pravin!
Interesting way of brining existing content performance into the analysis of blog titles. I use the SERP Analysis feature of Keyword Explorer to do the same kind of thing. I like to see what is ranking high in the search results, what words are used in the titles, and maybe most importantly, do the results for this title actually align with the service or product I offer?
I've used BuzzSumo in the past as well to get some of these metrics, but as a content idea generator, I think what you have is definitely worth bookmarking and folding into the content development process.
Thanks for sharing that!
Hi Brian,
Thanks for your post.
As a quick extra, I always find that crawling competitor content and extracting previous posts can be a good starting point for generating content ideas. Consider finding successful content on competitor sites and expanding upon them in your own words.
Also, finding previous successful content using tools like BuzzSumo can give great starting points.
Sean
To make a good brainstorming I think sometimes you need to step outside the box and think with common sense, amazing things sometimes appear. I also recommend quora :-)
Great post.
Another useful website (not mine) that i've found is keywordshitter.com.
Funny name but it generates a bunch of long tails for you.
Hi Brian Childs
That's a really informative post. All the free blog topic generators you mentioned are really helpful for anyone just starting out and struggling to find topic for content creation. Keyword Explorer by Moz stands out of the crowd. The best part I love about keyword explorer is that we can side by side check the competitiveness and metrics of all the keyword suggestions.
Hi Brian,
Your article has helped me to understand how the keyword Explorer is used, thank you for this article and share information, have helped me a lot with my ideas.
I am glad it was helpful!
Keyword Explorer has some great features. Take a look at this Whiteboard Friday by Rand: A Step-by-Step Process for Discovering and Prioritizing The Best Keywords
I think it gives some great context for how some of the features in Keyword Explorer were developed.
Are these apps in other languages???
Many thanks Brian! Excellent article explained in detail. We have taken enough ideas to apply these days to generate content in blogs given keywords.
Thanks again
Hey Brian - I appreciate the tips. I stopped using click bait titles long ago. My bounce rate and time on page have both been much better ever since.
[link removed by editor]
thanks a lot for this post.. it helped me understand the basic idea of keywords.. this has all the information i wanted and needed to know..
Hi Brian,
I also frequently use tweakyourbiz.com title generator - it creates groups of headlines like Lists, How Tos, Secrets, Motivation, Best and other.
I use this also. It is a great tip and use of keyword explorer for sure!
Great Article, thanks for sharing. I have a similar "Trio of Success" that I use with my own Conversion. Identifying a Need, offering a Solution (That Actually Works Based On Personal Research) and inspiring a Desire to want to know more.
Im sorry if this sounds like a stupid question lol but when you find TITLE alternatives such as the way this tools helps you find, doesn't that defeat the purpose of the keyword research that you have done and want the keyword you found to be in your title. Because don't you want to put a keyword that you have research specifically with high search volume to be in your title, because ultimately thats what the blog is going to be written around ( the keyword that you found).
yo creo que es muy importante que los títulos sean naturales porque muchas herramientas te arrojan títulos que de cara al SEO pueden ser muy efectivos pero demasiado forzados. Obviamente, combinar las pistas que te pueden dar estas herramientas con una buena escritura creo que es lo perfecto.
Hi Brian,
Nice article. Nothing ground breaking but a unique way to generate solid blog titles which can stand out.
We've used the Hubspot one, but haven't tried the other 3 recommended in the article. Can anyone share their experience, can you recommend any of them in particular?
That was super useful, Brian, thank you. I have been using a free Headline Analyzer from CoSchedule.com and have found that to be very useful. I used to work for a digital company that engaged in click-baiting and it drove me nuts. It was one of the top three reasons I left. Thanks for shedding some light for me. Cheers, Penelope
Thanks! I'm wondering if there is a way though to do a search based on keyword difficulty? It would be nice to sort and only pull keywords that have a difficulty score less than 30 as an example. If you covered that then sorry I may have missed it.
The other question I have is based on reliability. I have been using the ahrefs keyword explorer which is similar but I noticed they are pretty off on their data. The keyword search volume does not even come close to matching keyword planner from google and same for MOZ. I would just like to make sure I am putting the right time into creating good content for keywords that actually have a little bit of search vs. none at all.
I'll give an example. The keyword I was targeting was "how to delete a blog in wordpress" I created this blog post: How to Delete a Blog on Wordpress and from there didn't do any other SEO on it since the keyword difficulty score was 0.
I immediately went to page 2 at the top which is where I am now, but the odd thing is that with a keyword difficulty score of 0 I would have thought it would be higher. There were some larger sites I needed to take into account which is why it was lower I think.
On top of that though I noticed that the volume in ahrefs was supposed to be a couple hundred per month but here at MOZ and Google Keyword Planner it shows as almost nothing.
I'm not wanting to compare the 2 but I would like to have a better idea on topics to cover in the future that will be something I can add value to the web on but also know that there are actual searches happening for them so I don't just write for myself completely without anyone else ever finding it. Sorry for the novel and thanks for the advice.
Hi, Brian,
Thanks for the article. I'll find specially interesting the second tip for professional marketers and I will test to find the best qüestion by using KE.
Regards,
Czd
Thank you very much for your advice. Often you use this strategy to select several ideas that I have or just explore issues that have been treated.
Excellent topic I like a lot, did not know existed tools to generate topics on blogs
when I started using portent and hubspot both were quite good but as soon as you keep using them you will notice the topics are all the same or the tools suggest irrelevant and repeated suggestions.
Hello, Brian.
I've found your post very usefull. Thank you for share your knowledge with us. Keep doing SEO!
Some of the times, even a brainstorming session doesn't help just because whatever the content developer team suggest, Its already there like old wine in the new bottle, but keyword strategy can have many permutations and combinations and may result in some unexplored ideas in your business domain. Great article Brian.. Very helpful.
Hi Brian,
Thanks for this useful post. The points discussed above will surely help in creating compelling blog titles, and being prolific doing so at the same time. :)
Google always promote blog marketing that's why i want to ask, if every person will post blog and apply numerous blog for single topic then what reader will read. I don't think it is good because each blogger apply blog creation for promoting target website. So please explain if somebody has any specific area for blog marketing.
Title should be unique and thoughtful, productive or services type is getting older.
Thanks for the post.
These topics generated other 100 topics for me. Thanks for this post.
Learned something from this! Usually, when I come up with titles, I use Portent.com, but now I will try using this to generate a way better title since I'm doing guest posts sometimes on digital marketing agency sites.
[link removed by editor]
Hi Brian,
Nice information you shared with us, its very helpful for all blogger.
very informative article thanks for share this.
Hi Brian,
Thanks for the great post about generating quick blog topics. I want to add Ubersuggest on the list for the same purpose but it doesn't show the keyword difficulty, opportunity & potential etc. So Moz's Keyword explorer is the best among all. A user can search 5 keywords free daily on Moz Keyword explorer.
WOW!
TY :D
KJr
Niche & title for your blog should come from your brain but not from tool , Anyways nice tool
hello brain...thankful for your topic and idea .keep doing seo. <a href="https://www.richwebs.com/unlimited-keywords-seo/">SEO company in Bangalore </a>