The capabilities of Answer The Public

When writing content, it is important to create something that people will find interesting. Content is important for search engines, so that Google understands what a page is about. Furthermore, content that is useful or engaging is likely to be shared or cited. Effective content marketing depends on creating useful and engaging material, but even the best article will go unread if it doesn’t answer the question being asked. It is therefore important to start with keyword research, so that you know exactly what your target audience is looking for. This is where Answer The Public comes in.

What is Answer The Public?

The name of the tool gives a bit of a clue. ‘Answer The Public’ is an online tool that identifies relevant search terms and generates content ideas on a specific topic. This tool collects data from Google and Bing and then visualises it in a handy infographic. Why is it useful for an online marketer to know what people are searching for on Google? There are several reasons for this:

• To find inspiration or compare new ideas for blogs or content
• To get to know your audience
• To complement your keyword research
• To optimise for long-tail search terms
• To attract more visitors to your website

With thorough keyword research, carried out using the right tools, you can gain insight into what your potential customers are searching for. From there, you can guide potential customers towards a sale or conversion.

How does it work?

It’s incredibly simple, and anyone can use this tool. Follow these steps to carry out a search:

1. Type the topic you wish to search for into the ‘Enter a topic, brand or product’ field
2. Select the country and language that apply to you
3. Click on the ‘search’ button

As you scroll down, you’ll see a lot of data, sections and buttons. This might seem overwhelming, but fortunately the interface has a number of handy views and features to organise the large amount of information. The search terms are displayed visually in the form of questions about the topic, prepositions and comparisons. Each section has two views: visualisation and data. Although the default setting is a visual layout, you can also choose to switch the view to a table. To use this view, click on the ‘data’ tab.

Now that you know how to navigate the pages, you can scroll down to view the five different sections. Each section contains unique information that you can use to create great content.

1. Section 1: questions. In this section, you can find questions that people ask in conjunction with your search term. The questions are organised by common question words such as why, where, which, who, how, when and what.
2. Section 2: prepositions. In this section, you can find prepositions used in combination with your search term, such as ‘for’, ‘near’, ‘is’, ‘can’, ‘without’, ‘with’ and ‘to’.
3. Section 3: comparisons. In this section, you can see how your search term compares to other topics that use the terms ‘or’, ‘and’, ‘vs’ and ‘versus’.
4. Section 4: alphabetical: This section lists all terms in alphabetical order. This is the same information as in the sections above; it is simply presented in a different way.
5. Section 5: related. What other topics are people searching for your terms also interested in? You can view this in Section 5.

At the bottom of the page, there will also be an alphabetical list of search terms related to the topic, along with a visualisation of related topics and search queries.

When should you use it?

It is useful to use this tool during the exploratory phase – for example, for keyword analysis or analysing competitors. At this stage, you want to gather as much information as possible on the subject. This tool can help you do just that.

You can also use the tool when writing copy. For example, you can easily determine the subheadings and topics for your blog before you start writing.

Finally, you can also use it to find out more about your target audience. What do people think and what are they looking for? What do they consider important? This tool provides you with greater insights into these questions.

Free version / paid version

In the free version, you can carry out a maximum of 3 searches per day. You can also opt for the paid version. The paid version consists of a monthly subscription, cancellable at any time, costing $99 per month, or an annual subscription, cancellable at any time, costing $79 per month. With the paid version, you have access to the following additional features:

• Unlimited daily searches. With the paid version, the daily limit will never stop you from finding the best content, ideas and niches for your audience.
• Receive notifications for new suggestions. With the paid version, you can track how search behaviour changes over time. Within the tool, you can set up notifications to automatically receive weekly email summaries. These summaries show which new queries have emerged around a particular topic.
• High-resolution images. Export high-resolution images to present your insights. The paid version allows you to export the visual data as high-resolution images.
• Customer support. With the paid version, the customer support team is on hand to provide fast and friendly assistance.
• Hide unwanted suggestions and results. In the paid version of the tool, you can hide individual results or entire tables that are not relevant to your research.
• Export your results to CSV. Do you need to analyse data over a long period? For large-scale analyses, it is useful to be able to import the data into spreadsheets. In the paid version, you can download the data to CSV.
• Unlimited number of team members. With the paid version, you can work with an unlimited number of team members.

Advantages and disadvantages of AnswerThePublic

Now that we’ve clarified what the tool is, how it works and which versions are available, I’d like to outline the pros and cons for you.

Benefits

• One advantage is that you can use Answer the Public for free.
• You can use three free searches every day, which amounts to 15 searches per working week.
• It also operates in many different languages and countries.
• The site is always up and running and is clear
• You can download visuals to use in your analyses and presentations

Disadvantages

The free version of Answer the Public does not provide insights into the popularity of specific keywords. The paid version does offer these insights. It also shows the level of competition for each keyword.

Another drawback is that the English version provides far more suggestions than the Dutch version. For example, the search term ‘marketing’ yields far more results when the language setting is set to English than when it is set to Dutch. Even if you have the language setting set to Dutch, you will sometimes still see English search terms appearing alongside certain search terms.

The visual web is structured in such a way that all suggestions for long-tail keywords focus on ‘how’, ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘why’. It also sometimes provides predictable answers, as a sentence is constructed around a keyword. This data is sourced from Google and Bing. Furthermore, the visual web is rather awkward to read and would be better presented in a list or table. Finally, it is a pity that no more than two search terms can be entered. As a result, the results remain very general and standard, meaning you are unlikely to come up with many innovative ideas.

Conclusion

It is purely a list generated by Google’s auto-complete feature, using a fixed template. The results from the tool cannot be compared to how we humans search, make connections, complete keywords, etc. You’re better off brainstorming the old-fashioned way with a sheet of A4 paper. In addition, you can use many other tools to come up with new, original content. Think of the customer journey, personas, market research, etc. Anwer The Public fails to offer any added value (with the free version).

The visual interface feels restrictive, the language settings leave much to be desired, and the suggestions are often very general and irrelevant. For the price of the paid version, you’d be much better off looking for other tools. There are plenty of alternatives to Answer the Public that can provide you with much better insights. Consider Ahrefs and SEMrush, for example. For the same price, these offer far more options and insights.