Content marketing isn’t exactly the big new breakthrough anymore, but it’s still a critical part of any successful online strategy. People use web searches to answer millions of questions every day, leaving endless opportunities to position your brand as the answer.

Still, even as the importance of this online strategy grows, one fundamental question always sticks: what does my audience want to read about?

It’s easy to look at what your competitors are doing­– and potentially useful to “borrow” and improve upon some key ideas. But you also don’t want to look like a belated carbon copy of your competitor’s blog!

When you’re at a loss for a new post or just want to find something different to shake it up, these resources can help get you on the right track:

Take a Look in the Mirror

Sometimes it’s easy to overlook answers that are right in front of us. In Google Analytics, it’s easy enough to track the success of past blogs by viewing your Behavior Reports, or the Site Content data specifically. By viewing which blogs grabbed readers’ attention in the past, both in terms of views and how long they spent reading the blogs, you can dive deeper into the topics that readers are interested in.

If your company is using Google AdWords, you can also make use of keyword data that offers actual searches that prompted your ads to appear. By making use of some of the long-tailed keywords here, as well as ideas from Google Trends, you can get a good idea of specific answers your audience is searching for.

Keep Up With the Changing Seasons

It’s a simple concept for many industries: customers will search for different topics in the summer than they will in the winter.

Let’s say you write for a car dealership during the winter months; it’s a safe bet your audience is looking for tips to better battle ice on the roads. By the summertime, broken air-conditioning units and camping accessories should be a bit higher for search trends.

Industry-specific seasons are also a good opportunity. Maybe you write for an HR consulting firm; college graduation season is a great time to advise on résumé tips for before the wave of new applications begins to come in.

Don’t Ignore the Classics

Sure, past blog posts are great for generating new ideas, but what if your old blogs could continue generating traffic and leads for your site?

In a recent blog, Pamela Vaughan at HubSpot suggests that “historical optimization” could be a critical strategy going forward for content marketers. In other words, some old favorites may still be able to hold a strong web presence, if you take the time to optimize your old content and update it for a new strategy.

This strategy obviously requires a decent bit of research to correctly implement, but could pay off in the long haul. After all, why continue to write the same posts again if you can keep people coming to the original (but updated) idea?

With this combination of fresh new content complementing your already well-performing posts, you can be sure to keep your readers coming back for more.