How Data Can Help You Come Up with New Content Ideas in 2019

One of the most common struggles almost all digital marketers have to deal with on a regular basis is coming up with new content ideas.

Whenever you find yourself in the situation where you’ve run out of ideas, these tips will help you navigate the content drought, and by the time you finish reading this post, you’ll have a good idea of how to feed your website with regular, engaging content that can attract a constant stream of organic traffic.

When it comes to developing content that users would like to read and share, looking at the data you already have at your disposal is a smart strategy.

Many digital marketers stay ignorant to data insights as far as planning their content calendars are concerned, but by doing so, you neglect the wealth of insight into what has proven to work in the past. In the same vein, using data can just as much help you prevent making the same content marketing mistakes time and time again.

Google Analytics enables you to rely on numbers, instead of assumptions, which makes it a perfect tool to churn out new content that is likely to perform well and drive an abundance of organic traffic to your site.

Find the best-performing content and replicate it

Obviously, you don’t want to replicate tumbleweed content — pieces that you publish and that have absolutely zero impact. Instead, you want to find the pieces you’ve created in the past that performed well. But how do you do that? The basic criteria for shortlisting such content is the number of Pageviews received.

First, jump onto Google Analytics and navigate to “Behavior” on the left side of the screen. In the Behavior section, go to “Site Content” and select “All Pages”.

This will give you a list of the top-performing posts on your site within a particular period. This time duration can be changed to daily, weekly, monthly or any custom range for more specific results. You can also filter these results based on the traffic source, average time spent on site, bounce rate, technology and more to give you better insight into which content performs better on mobile versus desktop, or which content to create to drive organic traffic, for example.

Filter by Page Title to see which post titles get the most clicks and attract the highest amount of traffic. As you do this, ask yourself the following questions:

• Do clickbait titles receive more traffic than other titles, such as data-based titles?
• Which titles get the highest conversion rate?
• How do listicle articles and “how-to” posts perform on your site in terms of clicks and traffic?

Research shows that number-based headlines resonate with users more than question-based headlines, though this will depend on your audience and industry. Once you identify which types of headlines appeal most to users, you can optimize other content titles accordingly to increase your CTR. However, bear in mind that it’s not just enough to create a compelling title — 80% of readers never get past the headline, which means you need to make your content engaging to encourage people to stay on the page, which is where looking at time-on-page metrics can prove particularly useful. 

Search terms your site visitors are interested in

Many marketers appreciate the value of keyword research in identifying what terms their customers are searching for, but there is another way to do this which allows you to see which terms people are using on your website to find your existing content. Go to the “Behavior” section in Google Analytics, select “Site Search” and click on “Search Terms” to locate the search terms that are relevant to users visiting your site.

If you’ve used these search terms in your content already, great — but if not, create new content and use these keywords to improve your ranking and, by extension, your organic traffic. At Exposure Ninja, we regularly do this to find gaps in our clients’ website content and increase the level of organic traffic that is primed to convert.

Google Analytics is the easiest way to analyze data to come up with new content ideas. However, if you want to go the extra mile, you can try various other tools including SharedCount, BuzzSumo or Buffer to see which posts perform well across social media. Then, all you need to do is create even better content to take advantage of the number of users looking for this kind of content.

Most viral sites follow this model to create winning content that performs well each and every time. By following the same approach, you can come up with new content ideas in 2019 that will consistently drive traffic to your website.