SEO provides valuable insights about what your audience is searching for, asking about, wanting, needing. Keep reading for a free SEO tool every content marketer should know about and use to inform their content strategies and build a more engaging content calendar. How answerthepublic can help freelancers, agencies or corporate content teams – even if they’ve never done anything with SEO before.
Every time I use SEO-insights to inform brand storytelling, that content is always in the top 10 best performing content of the year. Every time. Because of this, I believe SEO is the low-hanging fruit your branded content strategy needs to drive better audience engagement. There are 3 billion Google searches every day, and 20% of those have never been searched before. SEO search insights act like an amazing focus group because they tell us what people are actually wanting to know about—things people may never tell us to our faces but can learn about through their google searches.
Whether you work with an SEO agency or not, the ability to research SEO content insights is something every content marketer should know how to do. Now, I’m not talking about super detailed SEO back-end website tech implementation stuff here. I’m talking about the beauty of front-end SEO long-tail search insights to point you in the right direction for content planning. When paired with a variety of other insight-mining from social listening, paid media results, existing audience insights, employees, and so on, SEO can act like a GPS for your content plans and take some of the guesswork out of the persistent question “What content should we create?”.
Best Things About Answerthepublic.com
There are several free online SEO research tools, and one of my favorite is answerthepublic.com. You don’t have to know ANYTHING about SEO to use this site. So, even if you’re an SEO novice, here’s something you can start doing today. They have a free and a paid version. The free version lets you do two searches per day. So, if you’re a good planner, you can research different things daily and avoid a monthly fee. I recommend starting with the free version first. But, if you have multiple clients or brands and need to dig deeper than this each day, they have monthly or annual paid pro versions available for unlimited searches, exporting of data and graphics to include in presentations, ability to hide search strings that aren’t relevant to fine-tune your findings, see search volume metrics, etc.
It's very easy to use. Just enter a word or two you want to know something about plus which country you want these search insights from.
Unlike other sites, answerthepublic.com not only gives you keyword phrases that match your query, it also provides a lengthy amount of additional extensions that are a gold mine for content creators. You can literally take each of the question or comparison results and make them into individual content pieces for your brand. I look for topics that match what I know about my brand, my audience, and pull out the strongest ones, while looking for themes across areas to help me ID other strong areas to lean into, or combine into my brand storytelling. How can your brand help answer the questions people have? How can you show your expertise and add value to your audience and share across owned and third-party channels including your blog, email, social, internal comms, influencers, etc?
QUESTIONS SEARCH RESULTS
Shows what questions people ask about your search. As an example I typed in “Creativity” and here is a graphic of the U.S.-based results.
PREPOSITIONS SEARCH RESULTS
Combines prepositions with your query for other ideas to inform your content strategy. Here’s the results for my “Creativity” prepositions:
comparisons SEARCH RESULTS
As it sounds, you’re given results comparing your query to other things. For “Creativity” I’m given and, like, or and vs. result options:
ALPHABETICAL SEARCH RESULTS
I won’t show a photo of this, but it takes all the results from each section and alphabetizes them.
RELATED SEARCH RESULTS
Answerthepublic.com looks for related themes across all of the above findings and groups them in this section. For “Creativity” the related results look like this:
Follow me on Instagram or LinkedIn as I continue to share other tools, tips and hacks to help content marketers excel at work and better connect with your audiences.
About the Author
Sarah Panus is a content marketing strategist, Minnesota mom, and owner of Kindred Speak, LLC, a remote consultancy that helps brands with digital content marketing, influencer marketing, and brainstorming. She's spent 17 years helping brands including Sleep Number, Starbucks, Nestle Waters, Christos Bridal, Game Crazy, Cone Inc, etc. speak a kindred language with their audiences, driving brand advocacy and millions in revenue and brand engagements. Email Sarah at sarah@kindredspeak.com to book a free 30-minute consultation to discuss your brand storytelling questions and needs. Follow Sarah on Instagram or LinkedIn as she helps parents working in content marketing-type roles who struggle with overwhelm or confusion at work. Learn more at www.kindredspeak.com.
