How to Find the Best Blog Topics: Generate Ideas Fast and Filter Them With This 6-Point Checklist
I once ranked number one on Google with a blog that brought in 150,000 to 200,000 new visitors a month. We thought we’d hit a goldmine.
Months later — not a single lead.
The topic was ‘best CMS platforms’ — content management software. I picked it because I knew the subject cold. The keyword had enormous volume. The competition was beatable. By every metric that most bloggers use to evaluate a topic, it was a winner.
What I missed was simpler than any of that: I wrote for someone like me — a marketer, a tech person, someone who builds websites — not for the people who actually buy from me. Different avatar entirely. They had no interest in that article.
That failure is what built the 6-point checklist I still use today. After 20 years of writing and ranking blog content at scale — for my own businesses and for hundreds of contractors across the US and Canada — I’ve found that any topic missing even one of these six criteria has a high likelihood of underperforming. Not might. Will.
This post covers two things: how to generate ideas quickly without overthinking it, and how to filter those ideas using the checklist before you invest hours writing something the wrong person will read.
Skip the filter and you might rank. You just won’t grow.
Where Good Blog Ideas Actually Come From
Most contractors overthink this part. They sit down to ‘do keyword research’ and get paralyzed by tools, data, and options. The reality is that your best blog ideas are already around you every day.
The goal here isn’t to generate the perfect idea. It’s to generate a large enough pool of ideas that the checklist has something to work with. Volume first, filter second.
Here are the five places I pull ideas from:
1. Your Own Experience and Expertise
What questions do you answer on every estimate? What do homeowners get wrong before they call you? What’s a common misconception in your trade that drives you crazy?
If you’re a painting contractor, you’ve probably explained the difference between exterior and interior paint, the real timeline for a repaint job, or why the cheapest quote almost always costs more in the long run. Those conversations are blog topics.
Write down everything you know that your customers don’t. That list is your starting point.
2. Customer Conversations
Pay attention to what people ask before they book, during the job, and when they call back with issues. Every question a customer asks is a question someone else is typing into Google.
Have your team log recurring questions for two weeks. You’ll have more ideas than you can write in a year.
3. Your Team
If you have estimators, project managers, or field crews, they hear things you don’t. A quick five-minute conversation at the end of the week asking ‘what questions did customers ask this week?’ can surface ideas you’d never think to write about.
4. Keyword Research Tools
Tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and the free version of Ubersuggest exist to show you what people are actually searching for. The process is simple: type in a broad topic related to your service, and let the tool show you the specific long-tail phrases people are using.
Don’t start here. Start with your own expertise and customer conversations first, then use tools to validate and expand. Using tools as your primary idea source tends to produce generic content that sounds like every other blog in your niche.
5. Competitor Content Gaps
Look at what your competitors are writing about, then look at what they’re not. Read the comments on their posts. Check what questions remain unanswered. Write the post that actually solves the problem more completely.
Once you have a list of 15 to 20 raw ideas, stop generating and start filtering. This is where most people fail — they skip the filter and write whatever feels right. The checklist exists to prevent that.
The 6-Point Blog Topic Validation Checklist
Every idea on your list needs to pass all six of these checks before you write a word. Missing even one is usually enough to tank the performance of an otherwise solid post. I built this after watching good writing get buried because the topic selection was flawed — starting with that CMS article.
Run every candidate topic through these six criteria in order:
Point 1: Long-Tail Keyword (4+ Words)
Short keywords are too broad to compete for and too vague to serve a specific reader. A topic like ‘exterior painting’ could mean anything. ‘How long does exterior house paint last’ is a specific question with a specific reader behind it.
Long-tail keywords — four or more words — give you three advantages: lower competition, a clearer reader intent, and better alignment between what you wrote and what the person actually needs.
Too broad: “house painting” Long-tail: “how often should you repaint a house exterior”
If your topic can’t be phrased as a specific long-tail phrase, it’s not ready to write yet.
Point 2: Search Volume (People Are Actually Searching for This)
A great topic that nobody searches for is just a journal entry. Before committing to a post, verify that real people are using that keyword or a close variation of it every month.
Use Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, or Google’s free Keyword Planner to check volume. You don’t need massive numbers. For local and niche contractor topics, 200 to 500 monthly searches is often enough to make a post worth writing — especially if the searcher intent is high.
What you’re looking for: consistent monthly volume, not a spike tied to a news event or a single month. If it flatlines in the tools, the audience isn’t there.
Point 3: Keyword Difficulty (You Can Actually Compete)
Volume without context is misleading. A keyword with 10,000 monthly searches is worthless if the first page of Google is owned by Home Depot, Angi, and Forbes. You won’t rank there regardless of how good your post is.
Keyword difficulty scores in tools like Ahrefs and Ubersuggest show you how hard it is to rank for a given term. For newer or smaller sites, stay under a difficulty of 30. Established domains can go higher, but the principle is the same: pick battles you can win.
High volume and high difficulty usually means you need to go more specific. Narrow the topic until the difficulty comes down to a level where you’re competitive.
Point 4: Business Alignment (Your Buyer Would Search This)
This is the one I learned the hard way. Volume, long-tail, low difficulty — that CMS article had all three. What it didn’t have was the right buyer at the end of the search.
Before writing anything, ask one question: would the person searching this keyword be someone who could potentially hire me or refer me?
A painting contractor writing about ‘best paint sprayers for contractors’ is writing for other painters — not homeowners. A flooring company writing about ‘how to install hardwood floors yourself’ is helping DIYers avoid hiring them. Both are common mistakes.
Your content should attract the customer, not the competitor and not the DIYer. If the topic serves the wrong avatar, no amount of traffic will convert.
Point 5: Search Intent (The Reader Wants a Blog, Not a Product Page)
Search intent is what a person actually wants to find when they type a query. Google has gotten very good at matching intent to results — which means if the intent behind a keyword is commercial (they want to buy something), Google will show product and service pages, not blogs.
The test is simple: Google your keyword and look at the first page. If you see informational articles and how-to guides, you’re in the right place. If you see e-commerce listings, service directory pages, or paid ads dominating the results, that keyword has commercial or transactional intent — and a blog post won’t rank for it no matter how well written.
Write blog content for informational intent. Use service pages and landing pages for commercial intent. Mixing the two creates posts that rank for nothing because Google can’t place them.
Point 6: Evergreen (This Will Still Be Relevant in Two Years)
The whole point of content marketing is that it compounds. A blog post that ranks today should still be pulling traffic 18 months from now. That only works if the topic stays relevant.
Evergreen topics are ones that don’t expire. ‘How often should you seal a concrete driveway’ will be searched this year, next year, and the year after. ‘Best exterior paint colors for 2024’ stops being relevant the moment the year turns.
There’s a distinction worth noting: an evergreen topic can have content that needs occasional updates. Seasonal content — spring painting prep, pre-winter exterior checklist — can be evergreen because those seasons come back every year. What you want to avoid is content tied to specific dates, product cycles, or news events that will make the post feel stale and outdated.
If the topic passes this check, the post you’re about to write is an asset that keeps working long after you hit publish.
The 6-Point Checklist at a Glance
Use this as a quick reference before committing to any blog topic:
How to Work the Process
Here’s the practical sequence for contractors who want to build a topic pipeline without spending hours on research every month:
- Set aside 30 minutes once a month. Collect every question your customers, team, and own experience have surfaced recently. Write them all down without filtering.
- Convert them into long-tail keyword phrases. Take the raw questions and phrase them the way someone would actually type them into Google. ‘Customers keep asking how long the job takes’ becomes ‘how long does interior house painting take.’
- Run each one through the six-point checklist. Check volume and difficulty in a keyword tool. Google each phrase to assess intent. Cut anything that fails a check.
- Keep a running list of approved topics. Anything that passes all six goes into your content calendar. Anything that fails gets set aside or reworked.
- Write from the approved list only. Don’t go outside the validated list because a topic ‘feels right.’ Feelings don’t rank. Validated topics do.
This process doesn’t require an SEO background. It requires discipline — specifically, the discipline to not skip the filter.
The Right Topic Is Half the Battle
Every hour you spend writing a blog that wasn’t validated is an hour that could have gone toward a post that actually pulls leads. Topic selection isn’t a step you do before the real work begins. It is the work.
The mistake I made with that CMS article — high volume, low difficulty, wrong avatar — is one I’ve seen hundreds of contractors make in different forms. They write what they know, or what seems popular, without running it through a filter that asks the one question that matters: will the right person find this, and will it mean anything to them when they do?
The six-point checklist answers that question before you invest time you can’t get back. Use it on every topic, every time. It’s not a creative constraint. It’s the reason your content builds something instead of just existing.
Once you have a validated list of topics, the next challenge is building a system that gets them written and published consistently. If you want help putting that together — or want an expert eye on your current content strategy — that’s exactly what we do inside our coaching program. Learn more about working with SCG.
