How to Come Up With Blog Post Ideas That People Actually Search For

Most advice on coming up with blog post ideas stops at the idea itself. Find a topic, check the volume, write the post. Repeat.

That’s fine as far as it goes. But there’s a step that nobody mentions, and it’s the one that separates a blog that feels like a coherent resource from one that feels like a pile of loosely related articles: thinking about where each idea fits within your site as a whole.

I learned this the hard way with Planet Houseplant. I’d find a keyword, confirm it had search volume, write the article. Find another keyword, confirm volume, write that one. Rinse and repeat. The individual articles were fine. But the site lurched from topic to topic because I was chasing keywords rather than building something. I was finding ideas and then thinking about where they fit, when I should have been thinking about where they fit first, and then finding the keyword angle that would get them ranked.

More on that shortly — because it’s the bit that changes how you think about idea generation entirely. But first, the methods.

Start with yourself — briefly

There’s a framework worth knowing before you open any tool: think about what you were searching for in your niche six months ago, or a year ago, before you knew what you know now.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that Planet Houseplant grew out of my own obsessive Googling when I first got into houseplants. I was my own ideal reader — searching for exactly the things my future audience would search for, because I’d been that person very recently. That overlap between your past self and your current reader is a useful source of ideas, especially early on.

The caveat is that it only works while the memory is fresh. Write those ideas down now, before your expertise takes you too far from where your reader is starting. The further into a niche you go, the harder it becomes to remember what you didn’t know at the beginning.

The biggest lie you ever tell yourself is ‘eh, it’s fine, I’ll remember that.’

Google Autocomplete: not just for keyword research

You’ve probably used Google Autocomplete as part of the keyword research process. But it’s also one of the most efficient idea generators available, and it works slightly differently when you’re using it for ideas rather than validation.

Open an incognito window and type the broadest version of your niche topic. Don’t press Enter. Write down every autocomplete suggestion. Then try variations — add question words at the start, add letters after your phrase one at a time, try “best”, “how to”, “why is my”.

You’re not looking for one keyword here. You’re generating a long list of topics your readers are actually searching for, in the language they actually use. Keep everything. You’ll filter and validate later.

People Also Ask: an entire content calendar in a box

The People Also Ask box on Google results pages is underused as an idea source. Most guides mention it as a way to find subheadings for a post you’re already writing. It’s waaay more useful than that.

Each question in the PAA box is a potential article in its own right. Click through each one to expand it — more questions appear every time you do — and you’ll quickly have dozens of topic ideas directly from Google, organised by what people are searching.

Cross-reference these against what you’ve already written (or planned to write). Any question that isn’t covered by an existing article on your site is a gap worth filling.

This is a long and boring process, but OH MY GOD planning out what your website is gonna look like before you start writing will ensure your most successful website isn’t a stressful mess of random articles (no, I’m fine, thanks for asking).

Pinterest Autocomplete: the vocabulary your reader uses

Pinterest works differently from Google — the searches tend to be more visual, more aspirational, and often phrased quite differently from how the same topic appears in Google results. That difference is useful.

Type your core topic into Pinterest and note the autocomplete suggestions and the colour-coded keyword bubbles that appear after you press Enter. These often surface angles you wouldn’t find on Google — and they tell you how your audience describes things when they’re browsing for inspiration rather than looking for a specific answer.

The word aesthetic pops up a lot. I don’t know why. I can only assume I’m too old for it. Surely no one is actually searching ‘Pothos aesthetic’?? Are they?

YouTube comments: where your reader’s vocabulary lives

This is one I don’t see mentioned often, and it’s been more useful to me than most of the tools people pay for.

Go to YouTube and find popular videos in your niche. Don’t watch them (unless you want to). Go straight to the comments. This is where your actual audience is asking questions in their own words, unfiltered, to a creator they trust.

What you’re looking for is vocabulary as much as topics. After a surprisingly short time in any niche, you start using the technical or enthusiast terminology without noticing. The people watching YouTube videos about your topic haven’t made that shift yet — and that gap is where blog post ideas live.

A concrete example: I noticed that in houseplant YouTube comments, people were consistently using common plant names rather than botanical ones. “Umbrella tree” instead of Schefflera. “Money tree” instead of Pachira (or Crassula, or Dracaena, or Pilea). Once you’ve been in a niche for a while, you stop thinking in common names. But your reader is still using them, and often searching with them too. An article about umbrella tree care written by someone who has a Schefflera, aimed at someone who just Googled “umbrella tree dropping leaves”, is exactly the kind of thing that ranks — because the people who know the plant well have mostly moved on to writing about it with its proper name.

YouTube comments are where you go to remember how your reader thinks and talks before your expertise got in the way.

This is a bit niche dependent by the way. This niche (and many others that attract people looking to make easy money hahahahaha) is FULL of people asking how to start a blog. Over and over. On a video about how to start a blog. Just…WATCH THE FUCKING VIDEO.

It frustrates me SO MUCH when people spam Reddit and YouTube ask how they can do x and when they get a reply they give a long list of reasons why that advice won’t work for them. ‘How can I start a blog when I’m a single mother with 7 kids that are all homeschooled, I have no money for hosting, and I work 60 hours a week?’ You can’t! Try Substack!

Reddit and forums: the nitty gritty, niche stuff

Reddit is not your competitor. I want to be clear about that, because some blogging advice treats it that way. Reddit and a blog serve different needs — some people want a conversation and a range of opinions, some people want a single reliable answer they can find and leave. Those are different jobs. The same person might do both at different moments.

Is it annoying the Google is currently serving Reddit posts from 7 years that don’t really answer the query? Am I mad that I spent all summer propagating Rhaphidophora cuttings so I can write an article about it, only to be knocked off the top spot by Reddit post about a different plant? Nah, I’m fine.

Anyway.

What Reddit is, for our purposes, is a research tool. Search your niche on Reddit and read the threads. What questions keep coming up? What frustrations get upvoted? What does the top comment on a high-engagement post actually say — and could you write a more thorough, more findable version of that answer on your blog?

Facebook groups and niche forums work the same way. Wherever your audience congregates to ask questions is a source of ideas, and the questions that get a lot of responses are the ones worth writing about.

This won’t last much longer, by the way. Social media is currently under attack from people thinking they’re clever by lurking in niche subreddits so they can gather ideas for making, specifically, AI apps. It’s v v transparent and all the comments are informing the OP of this fact.

The step everyone skips: where does this fit?

Here’s the thing I wish someone had told me when I was building Planet Houseplant.

(Maybe they did and I didn’t listen? Or it’s just…super obvious?)

Finding a keyword with good volume and low difficulty is satisfying. It feels like progress. But if you just write that article and move on to the next keyword, you end up with a site that covers a lot of ground without quite hanging together. Readers arrive at one article and have nowhere obvious to go next. Google can’t quite tell what the site is really about. The whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts.

This means awesome easy SEO wins like internal linking either don’t really work or are WAY more difficult because nothing fits together nicely.

The fix is to consideesite structure before you think about keywords, not after.

Before I write any article now, I ask: does this exist because it needs to be here, or does it exist because I found a keyword? Both are valid reasons — but they’re different, and they lead to different decisions.

In fact, I go one step further. When I started the Pothos site, the entire site was mapped out first. Before I even bought hosting. I know the topics that need to be covered first, and then we dive deeper later.

Some articles need to exist because your site would feel incomplete without them, regardless of whether you can rank for them. On the pothos site I’m building, I need an article about how much light pothos need. That’s a foundational care topic. I’m probably never going to outrank The Spruce or Apartment Therapy for that keyword — they have too much authority, and increasingly, plant retailers are claiming those spots too. But it would be strange not to have it. It anchors the site and gives other articles something to link to.

Then within that topic area, I look for the specific angle I can rank for. Grow lights for pothos, for example. I have several, I know which budget options actually work, and I know the pitfalls of more professional setups (I am not suspending a grow light from ceiling hooks – just…no). That’s an article with real experience behind it, targeting a specific question, within a topic area that already exists on my site. It slots in naturally. It links to the light article. The light article links back to it. The site starts to feel like a resource. If site feels like a useful resource, your reader will bookmark it, which is the next best thing to signing up to your email list.

The keyword came second. The site structure came first.

A practical process for generating ideas with structure

Rather than starting with a blank page and a keyword tool, try this order:

First, map the topics that need to exist on your site regardless of rankability. Think about what a new reader would expect to find. These become your content skeleton.

Then, within each topic area, use the methods above — Autocomplete, PAA, Pinterest, YouTube comments, Reddit — to find the specific angles that have search volume and are winnable for a site at your stage.

Finally, check each idea against your existing content. Is this filling a gap? Is it something you’d link to from an article you’ve already written, or that would link back to something already on the site? If the answer to both is no, that’s a signal to reconsider.

Ideas that fit the site generate ideas for more articles. Ideas that don’t fit tend to sit in isolation, getting a trickle of traffic that never compounds into anything.

One more thing: Google Search Console

Once your site has been live for a few months and has some content indexed, Google Search Console becomes one of your best idea generators. Go to Performance → Search Results and look at the queries you’re appearing for but not ranking well for — the ones with reasonable impressions but low click-through rate.

These are topics Google thinks you’re relevant for, but where your current content isn’t quite hitting the mark. Sometimes the answer is a better title and meta description. Sometimes it’s a new article targeting that specific query more directly.

Just be careful not to create two articles targeting the same keyword — that’s keyword cannibalisation, and it can hurt both rather than help either. If a query is already partially covered by an existing post, updating that post to cover it better is usually the right move.

Frequently asked questions

What to read next

Once you have a list of ideas, the next step is turning them into a content plan — Article 25: How to Build a Blog Content Plan (And Actually Stick to It) covers exactly that.

If you want to understand what types of posts tend to perform best before you commit to a format, Article 24: What Types of Blog Posts Get the Most Traffic? is worth reading first.