Written by Rod Vedder – Vice President, Client Relations and SEMrush Ambassador
Coming up with content ideas is easy. Coming up with content ideas that your audience is actively searching for—and that can improve your visibility in Google and AI-powered search—is much harder.
A strong content strategy should answer three questions: What does your audience want to know? What content is already succeeding in your market? And where are there opportunities your competitors are capturing that you aren’t?
That’s where Semrush can become much more than a keyword research tool. By combining keyword data, audience questions, competitor research, content gaps, and AI visibility insights, Semrush can help turn content planning from guesswork into a repeatable, data-driven process.
Here are seven practical ways to use Semrush to uncover content opportunities for your website.
1. Start With a Seed Keyword When You Need Direction
Sometimes the hardest part of content planning is simply figuring out where to begin. A seed keyword gives you a starting point from which you can explore the topics, questions, and related searches surrounding your business.
For a roofing company, that might be “roof replacement.” A financial advisor might begin with “retirement planning.” A manufacturer could start with a particular product, process, or industry application.
Enter that term into Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool and you’ll find related keywords along with metrics such as search volume and keyword difficulty. From there, one broad concept can quickly become a collection of potential service pages, articles, FAQs, comparisons, and supporting content.
The goal isn’t necessarily to chase the keyword with the largest search volume. Look for topics that combine relevance, demonstrated audience demand, and a realistic opportunity for your website to compete. That’s also the approach Semrush recommends when beginning content research from a seed keyword.
2. Use Questions to Discover What Your Audience Actually Wants to Know
One of the most useful features within Keyword Magic Tool is the ability to isolate question-based searches.
Instead of seeing only terms like “commercial roofing,” you can uncover questions such as:
How long does a commercial roof last?
What is the best roofing material for a flat roof?
How much does commercial roof replacement cost?
These searches provide direct evidence of the problems and questions your potential customers are trying to solve. Semrush specifically recommends these question-based keywords as starting points for articles, FAQs, newsletters, and other content.
They’re increasingly important for AEO as well. Search is becoming more conversational, and creating content that clearly states a question and provides a useful, direct answer gives search engines and AI systems well-structured information to understand and potentially reference.
3. Expand Keywords Into Topics With Topic Research
Keywords are useful, but your content strategy shouldn’t consist of hundreds of disconnected keyword targets.
Semrush’s Topic Research tool helps broaden a seed keyword into related themes, questions, headlines, and subtopics. Its Mind Map can also reveal relationships between those ideas that aren’t immediately obvious from a traditional keyword list.
That can help transform one article idea into an entire topic cluster.
For example, “commercial roofing” might lead to content covering roof inspections, maintenance, replacement costs, roofing systems, storm damage, warranties, and common commercial roofing problems.
Instead of publishing isolated articles, you’re building a library of interconnected information around subjects directly related to your expertise. That gives users more useful resources while establishing greater topical depth across your website.
4. Look at Reddit to Learn How Real People Talk
Keyword tools tell us what people search. Reddit can help reveal how people actually discuss those subjects.
That distinction is valuable.
Real conversations contain questions, frustrations, misconceptions, objections, and terminology that may never appear in polished marketing copy. Semrush recommends researching Reddit threads that already rank in Google and examining the language people use when discussing the subject.
Suppose your keyword research identifies “tankless water heater” as an opportunity. Reddit discussions might reveal recurring questions such as whether tankless systems are worth the investment, whether they work for large families, how maintenance differs, or why someone’s existing unit isn’t providing enough hot water.
Those conversations can become excellent article sections, FAQ questions, video topics, and social content.
They’re also valuable for LLM-focused content because users increasingly interact with AI through conversational, natural-language prompts rather than abbreviated keyword searches.
5. Find What’s Already Working for Competitors
You don’t always need to invent a new content strategy from scratch. Your competitors can provide valuable clues about what your market already responds to.
Semrush’s competitive research tools can identify pages generating organic visibility for competing websites. You can then evaluate which subjects, formats, and search intents consistently perform across the market. Backlink analysis can provide another signal by identifying competitor content that has attracted links from other websites.
The objective isn’t to copy a competitor’s article. It’s to identify validated demand and determine whether you can create something more useful.
Could you provide a clearer explanation? Add firsthand expertise? Answer questions they missed? Include original photography, data, examples, FAQs, or video?
Competitor research tells you what’s working. Your expertise should determine how to make it better.
6. Use Keyword Gap to Find Opportunities You’re Missing
Keyword Gap is particularly useful when you already have an established website but aren’t sure what to create next.
Compare your domain against relevant competitors and look at the Missing and Untapped keyword categories. Missing keywords are terms the compared competitors rank for while your domain doesn’t; Untapped opportunities include terms where at least one competitor ranks and you don’t.
This can expose entire subjects your content strategy has overlooked.
Suppose three competitors have strong visibility around preventative maintenance, but your site barely discusses it. That doesn’t mean you should automatically create an article because they did. It means you’ve discovered a potential gap worth investigating.
Combine that competitive insight with search volume, intent, difficulty, and relevance to determine whether the topic deserves a place in your strategy.
7. Look Beyond Google With AI Visibility
This is one of the most interesting additions to the content research process.
Traditional keyword research asks:
“Where are my competitors ranking that I’m not?”
AI visibility research adds another question:
“What topics are AI platforms discussing my competitors for but not my brand?”
Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit can identify topics and prompts where competitors appear in AI-generated answers while your brand is absent. Its Visibility Overview also reports mentions, citations, cited pages, performing topics, and topic opportunities across supported AI search experiences.
That gap can reveal content opportunities traditional keyword research might miss.
For example, your company may rank well for a core product keyword but rarely appear when users ask an AI assistant to compare solutions, recommend providers, explain a use case, or answer a related industry question.
That suggests the next opportunity may not be another keyword-focused page. You may need deeper content addressing the broader topic, including comparisons, definitions, FAQs, applications, supporting evidence, and clearly stated expertise.
And that’s an important distinction as SEO evolves. Semrush defines AI visibility around whether brands are mentioned, cited, or recommended in AI-generated responses—not simply whether a page holds a traditional search ranking.
Content Strategy Is Becoming a Search Visibility Strategy
The biggest takeaway is that finding content ideas shouldn’t begin with “What should we write about this month?”
A better process starts with data:
What are people searching for? What questions are they asking? What topics matter around those searches? What are they discussing naturally? Where are competitors succeeding? What are we missing? And where are competitors appearing in AI answers without us?
Semrush gives marketers tools to investigate all of those questions. The result isn’t just a longer list of blog ideas. It’s a roadmap for building a stronger content footprint around the subjects that matter to your customers and your business.
At Robintek, this is increasingly how we approach content strategy. We use keyword research alongside competitor analysis, technical SEO, search intent, and emerging AI visibility data to identify opportunities that can strengthen a website’s presence across both traditional and AI-powered discovery.
As search continues to change, the objective is no longer simply to rank for a keyword. It’s to build enough useful, authoritative content around your expertise that your business can be found, understood, cited, and recommended wherever customers are looking for answers.
Need help identifying the next opportunities for your website? Robintek can evaluate your existing content, competitors, keyword visibility, and AI search presence to develop an SEO and AEO strategy built around the topics that matter most to your audience. Contact us for a consultation!
