Answer The Public (#15)

Continuing the theme of SEO, Keywords, and Market Research analysis tools, today’s tool is called Answer The Public.

https://answerthepublic.com/

Answer The Public is a unique graphical tool with a sophisticated user interface. Its primary sell is that you can explore what people are searching for. As they explain on their homepage:

There are 3 billion Google searches every day, and 20% of those have never been seen before. They’re like a direct line to your customers’ thoughts…

Sometimes that’s ‘How do I remove paper jam’. Other times it’s the wrenching fears and secret hankerings they’d only ever dare share with Google.

— answerthepublic.com 7/15/2020 (marketing material)

This is a somewhat profound statement if you stop to consider its implications: 1 out of 5 searches on Google is for something “never been seen before.” It’s unclear to me precisely what they mean by that (I find it doubtful they mean 20% of the searches are unique.) I assume it means are for topics that are new, for example, for any given day. That is, four out of 5 times people search on Google it is for something Google has already amassed years of knowledge on. One out of five (or 20%) are for keywords or trends that happened today, or very recently. When you search for today’s news, as everyone who uses search engines knows, you get results from recent content, which typically gives you insight into the current conversation of what you are researching.

Despite starting with this video of a slightly creepy guy nodding at you suspiciously playing on a loop (it’s really rather creepy if you keep looking at it), the tool is much more interesting once you leave the home page.

As you can see, what they are suggesting is that people will share things with Google that they wouldn’t share otherwise. From this, you can gain a deeper understanding of your market and its trends.

Here’s what happens when I search for their example word “chocolate”

It breaks your response down into questions, prepositions, comparrisons, and search terms begin with a given word.

Here we see the “questions” section, which shows me related searches broken out into why, when, who, which, where inquisition categorization (interestingly, in addition to the Five Ws and How, they also contain “are”, “will” and “can” which also categorize questions in the tool)

Here’s a view of the “preposition” for chocolate:

The “comparissons” section compares this search term with similiar or contrasting search terms.

And finally the “Alphabeticals” section which shows you all related keywords that begin with “chocolate”