Hey @roisinkirby,
We usually use a combination of a few things. I’m a big fan of using Google to do my research. Once I’ve identified a few topic areas that I want to go after, I’ll start looking at potential questions someone might ask. Google’s autocomplete feature is really useful here. I just type in my keywords, and it gives me a list of related search terms.
I’ll also make use of the ‘People also ask’ and related searches features. For the last 6 or so months, I’ve also been using a really helpful chrome extension called ‘Keywords everywhere’ that shows the number of searches, difficulty rating and CPC on individual search terms.
Quora is another really useful tool, and I’d definitely recommend using this not only to find potential questions, but also to answer them directly on the platform. You can easily link to your own content and this will really help to build your authority.
We also use SEMrush, but our gold dust is in the conversations our sales guys are having with prospects. We asked them to start recording their conversations so that we can pick out key questions/topics that need addressing and we also have everything recorded in the CRM so it’s easy to find.
The other great thing about doing this is that once we’ve produced that piece of content, we can share it with sales, so that should that question come up again, they can simply link straight to the article.
For planning we use a good old fashioned spreadsheet. We have different tabs for our research around each topic area, as well as our content matrix which lists all of our existing content and what we need to do to improve it, and the content we’ve not created yet. And how each of these pieces of content tie together to form our topic clusters. Once this is complete, we’ll start building out our content calendar for the year so that everyone’s clear on what’s being published when, and what needs to be done to ensure that happens.
If anyone would be interested in using a version of this spreadsheet for their own business, please just let me know!
There’s also some more info in these posts: