Increasingly, SEO practitioners, and digital marketers, in general, depend on an increasing number of tools and resources that can help them maximize their efforts. SEO is an ever-changing, multifaceted pursuit that involves more ‘moving parts’ and crucial steps than ever before. And without some helpful tools, even the best SEOs would never eat, drink or sleep to keep up with it all.
With all this being said, there are a lot of SEO tools out there. Some are specifically designed for SEO; others help with a specific aspect of it (backlinking, content creation, outreach for link building, technical SEO, etc.) The one thing for sure is that it can quickly become confusing and overwhelming if you are trying to sort through all these tools to find just the right ones for your needs.
Because SEO in 2020 is so complex and so time-consuming, most companies looking to take advantage of all it has to offer – choose to outsource their SEO. But we know that not every company is in that position yet – maybe they are just starting out, or have reduced their marketing spend as a result of the havoc caused by the COVID -19 pandemic – and are trying their hand at some DIY SEO to get some momentum going.
With this in mind over the coming days and weeks we are going to share our honest opinions, and experiences, with some of the best known, and the not so well known, SEO tools available. Some of these are great SEO tools, and we use them ourselves on a regular basis. Others are newer, and we are just now testing them out ourselves. We hope you’ll keep checking back to find out which SEO tool reviews we are covering and what we think. And you find this series to be a helpful SEO tool resource.
To get things started, we are going to take a closer look at an SEO tool that has been creating a lot of buzzes recently as not only is a great help for content creation in general but can be especially helpful when you are creating content with voice search in mind, a new SEO frontier that’s growing fast.
AnswerthePublic Review
For the content created to be beneficial to your audience, and to SEO, you want to produce content that potential clients, customers, or simply just followers really want to read. Not just because their boss tells them or because they are bored, but because it gives them information, at least about your chosen subject or product niche, that answers their most burning questions.
We understand that it’s anything but easy to produce great content. Without a decent strategy to help you, it can be nerve-wracking and time-consuming. Writing material that people care about and making it easy for them to find is no small feat, which is where, the developers say, AnswerThePublic comes in. But does it really help? That’s what we are going to take a look at.
What Is AnswerThePublic?
AnswerThePublic is a web-based utility that offers both free and paid plans. As you might expect, the paid version is far more comprehensive, but even if you plan on paying later, trying the interface out in ‘free mode’ is the best way to get started.
As it is a web-based utility, there is no software to install, and you can use it across all kinds of devices. Technically, you can even use it without creating a formal account. Just type and go.
AnswerThePublic – as it’s actually written, that’s not a typo -is powered by huge amounts of publically available search data from all over the world. The fact is that people ask questions via Google (or whatever search engine they prefer) that they would not ask someone else.
Questions that they won’t ask their co-workers, their best friends, or often not even their doctors. This means that the data AnswerThePublic gathers can tell you lots that you need to know about your prospects/readers/clients that they will not tell you themselves.
If you are the person – or at least an online entity – that solves these problems and answers these tricky questions readers will often come to trust your brand and potentially buy your goods and services as you have been so helpful.
This tactic can also be especially helpful for affiliate marketers, as it can help you determine what really matters – and therefore, what products really matter – to your audience.
Using AnswerThePublic
Using AnswerThePublic is delightfully easy. All you need to do is type the address in the browser, select the geographical area you are interested in researching and type in a keyword.
Within seconds, you’ll be offered a lot more data than you might expect from a free SEO software. Just take a look at the screenshot below for an idea of what you might see:
You will see lots of data and segments and buttons as you scroll down. Don’t let yourself get distracted or overwhelmed by it. To help you organize the large amount of data, the AnswerThePublic interface has a range of helpful views and features.
There are two different views in each section: visualization and data. By clicking on the tab for each one, you can switch between views. Both display the same information, just in different ways.
The visualization view provides you with the results in a fancy graph, which can be extremely helpful if you need to provide your boss – or client – with results or impress your colleagues. And since the chart is an image map, to see the relevant search results, you can click on any query result to get even more information.
If you want to display the data in a format that can be viewed or copied more easily, click on the Data tab. Each of the parts is displayed separately for each segment, giving you a more manageable chunk of data.
Scroll down to look at the five different types of performance groups, now that you know how to use the views. Each section has unique data that you can use to create awesome content. To learn about the kinds of data you might expect to get with your searches, take a minute to browse through each section. But the most important are:
Questions-What questions people ask, grouped by common query terms, such as why, where, will, should, how, how, how, when and what, using your search phrase.
Prepositions-Using prepositions such as for, near, is, can, without, with, and to, what searches are performed on your subject.
With all this data you should be able to find topics and ideas for content that will address direct concerns – and direct searches – your prospects are executing right now, as the results are displayed based on real-time data.
Comparisons– What people want to hear about how the subject using the words “or”, “and”, “vs” and “versus” relative to other subjects.
What We Love About AnswerThePublic
We do like AnswerThePublic, and our content team uses it a lot. In summing the software up, we’re going to start with the positive:
It is 100% free.
Three free searches can be used every day, which translates into 15 searches a week at work. By getting the information before you start writing, you really have nothing to lose, especially as it only takes a few minutes. Even if you use just a portion of it, it is highly likely that your content will be more interesting to your audience and relevant to their queries.
It takes minutes, at most, to run the report.
To run a query takes seconds in fact. To read the report takes a few minutes.
The results are customizable.
There are plenty of ways to arrange the data in the format you need. Depending on your needs, pick the data or visualization view. Hide the ideas that are not helpful to you, so you don’t have to wade through them endlessly. Turn the Excel version into the start of a work schedule or editorial calendar.
Your reports can be saved.
If you are using the free version, this is particularly helpful. You can go back weeks later to look at the data once again when you save a report. This prevents you from rerunning and wasting your free reports from the same reports. You will need to create a free account to save, but that is simply a matter of entering an email address and choosing a password.
Is AnswerThePublic perfect? No, but few SEO tools are. If you want more than three searches a day, you’ll need a paid plan, which may be more than you can stump up for (or even want to.) We also kind of wish there was a mobile app, but maybe that’s coming as a lot of people introduce this tool to mention that.
Is it worth a shot? Absolutely. If you only write a few blogs a week that three a day search limit might be all you need. If you create content at enterprise volumes, then the membership might be a good investment. The data can, of course, be gained elsewhere but it would take a LOT longer and be nowhere near as easy to understand, so it’s great for those who are wonderful wordsmiths but not coders or big data fans.
AnswerthePublic Costs and Sign Up
AnswerThePublic is, as we have mentioned, free for a limited number of daily searches, while paid plans start at £99/$99 a month. You can get started with this SEO tool very easily, though, simply by clicking here.
