Answer the Public is a free, online tool that provides insight into the kind of information people are searching for online. It’s championed by content creators and marketers as an effective means of figuring out what their audiences want to know more about. The question is: Does Answer the Public’s utility translate to small business owners, too? That’s what we’ll discuss this time on “Prospect Genius Reviews…”
How Does Answer the Public Work?
Before we dive into how well Answer the Public works for small business owners, though, we should briefly review how it works, period.
When you first go to the home page, you simply type in one of your business’s keywords and select your country. Then, Answer the Public generates a visual graphic to show all the questions and phrases people are frequently using when searching for that keyword. This data tells you what kind of specific information “the public” wants about that keyword, so you can put it in the right context.
To quote its own website, Answer the Public is meant to give you “a hint of the motivations & emotions of the people behind each search query.”
We experimented with the tool by using “SEO company” as our keyword. Answer the Public tells us that users are asking questions like:
- “How much does an SEO company charge?”
- “Why hire a professional SEO company?”
- “What makes a good SEO company?”
- “Who is a good SEO company?
They’re also searching for phrases like:
- “Best SEO company for real estate”
- “SEO company for contractors”
- “SEO company for photographers”
- “SEO company for small business”
- “Best local SEO company for Google”
And so on.
From just this one example, you can see how Answer the Public shows us what kind of context we should be focusing on when marketing ourselves as an SEO company.
What Are the Benefits of Using Answer the Public?
As we mentioned above, Answer the Public’s primary goal is to illustrate the context in which certain keywords are being searched. This presents limitless opportunities for honing your content and zeroing in on exactly what kinds of questions and concerns your target customers would like you to address.
To that end, Answer the Public truly can be utilized by anyone looking for a little creative inspiration. However, it especially benefits small business owners who:
- Struggle to come up with topics to write about on their blogs.
- Need more ideas for social media posts.
- Seek a better understanding of what their desired customers want.
- Need a more accurate way to target their website content and keywords for SEO.
These are all common issues facing web savvy business owners like you. You know you need to improve your online content and speak to your audience with a clearer focus, but you can’t figure out how.
That’s what makes Answer the Public so beneficial to small business owners with limited resources. You don’t exactly have the funding for market research or focus groups. But Answer the Public is a free way to find out what the general public wants to learn more about, and that’s a terrific place to start.
Are There Any Downsides?
Obviously, nothing is perfect. And as a free, online tool, Answer the Public is no exception.
For example, as Elisa Gabbert of WordStream notes, Answer the Public does not provide any search volume data with the phrases and questions it presents you. Therefore, you can’t tell right away which queries are more popular than others (and, thus, which ones you should be focusing on first). However, Gabbert goes on to say that you can easily remedy this issue by using another keyword tool (even Google Keyword Planner) to check the numbers on whichever query you want to use.
What’s the Verdict?
Prospect Genius reviews Answer the Public with a high degree of positivity and excitement. Once we discovered this tool, we immediately started thinking about how we could implement it in our own content strategy. Plus, it’s a free tool, so there’s nothing to lose.
Try it out for your own small business today and let us know what you think!
Stay tuned for the next edition of “Prospect Genius Reviews…,” when we’ll discuss the pros and cons of using WordPress to host your website.