A Quick Primer on How To Use Google to Brainstorm Ideas
Instantly crowd-source more creative inspiration
Every marketing campaign or project starts with an idea. However, many people get stuck on the idea step by not knowing how to brainstorm them—especially if they are working alone.
If this sounds like you, then good news, because you can improve your idea generation game by knowing how to use Google as a tool for brainstorming.
1. Identify Useful Keywords for Google
Google is so ubiquitous now that people don’t pay a second thought about how it works and why Google gives such great search results—which is a shame, because knowing how Google works can help you understand why it can be a good tool for brainstorming ideas.
In short, Google works from an algorithm called PageRank that determines a website’s usefulness by seeing how many other people or websites link to a specific website. This means Google works by people essentially voting on which website is best via the links they include to other websites. The underlying assumption is that people link to a website if it’s useful, so lots of people linking to a site is an indicator of the site’s usefulness.
So each Google search is basically a free focus group that has already done the hard work of screening out bad ideas—leaving you only with the good ideas relevant to your topic.
The only thing you need to do to unlock your free Google focus group is to use the right keywords to ask Google—and thereby yield the best results to help generate quality ideas for your goals.
This can be done with the 5W questions (“who, what, when, where and why”—plus “how”) as a basic starting point to search for as keywords. However, you should not limit yourself to only these keywords and spend the time thinking about what keywords are relevant for your brainstorming session.
Suppose that you are trying to brainstorm relevant ideas for how to create and manage a website for your small business, and you have no idea what the important factors are when running a website. A perfect keyword to start with in this case is “important” along with “website.”
Now that you’ve got these two keywords, you can pair them with Google’s autocomplete tool.
2. Use Google Autocomplete
Google Autocomplete is a tool that tries to predict a phrase or a question that Google thinks a user might be looking for based on what other users have searched on Google previously. This is an underrated tool for brainstorming because it can quickly give you multiple ideas without any real work on your part!
See the below screenshot showing the useful ideas the Google Autocomplete tool can give you for the website example mentioned earlier, using a couple of starting keywords, “important” and “website”:
Right away we get five great ideas for our brainstorm session on what to learn about managing a website for a small business. These ideas are “important website metrics,” “important website features,” “important website analytics,” “important website KPIs,” and “important website elements.”
You can now write down these five great ideas for your brainstorm session that will be useful in helping in your goal of knowing what are important criteria for creating and managing a website for a small business.
But wait, there is more Google can do for brainstorming ideas as seen in the next tip!
3. Use Google’s “People Also Ask” Tool
The last way you can use Google to help generate ideas is by using Google’s “People also ask” tool after you submit an autocomplete search. This is great for generating ideas because again, the suggestions given by Google have been asked by other people, so you know the ideas you can generate from them are based on people’s collective interests.
In this example below, I’ve searched the “important website metrics” autocomplete suggestion by Google that gave me this “People also ask” tool below:
If you did not have any ideas on how to create or manage a website, these ideas such as “most important SEO metrics” will give you the basic knowledge to move forward to achieve your small business website idea goals.
And with that, the last thing you should do is rinse and repeat all of these three tips over multiple Google searches and you will be brainstorming great ideas in no time for your project goals or whatever else you need idea help for.
