How to Use “Answer The Public” in Your Blog Posts

One of the hallmarks of a good piece of content is that people read it because it’s useful. It gives value to them, whether it’s notification of news, analysis of patterns and how they affect the reader, instructions for some product or service, or tips on how to optimize a business process.

The question we as content marketers run into is how to find those topics worth writing about. I’m sure you all have run into the same problem I do on a regular basis. What content idea:

1. Is open enough that a post I write can have a chance of seeing traffic?
2. Is searched enough that users will find it interesting enough to read and link to?
3. Is deep enough to act as the foundation of an entire blog post?

Finding those topics is going to need a deal of research and knowledge of the industry and awareness of how topics and industry trends are growing. Fortunately, there are tools you can use to make this job just that much easier. Enter: Answer the Public.

What is Answer the Public?

Answer the Public is a keyword research and content ideation tool built by the team behind CoverageBook, a UK-based PR coverage report generator. In June 2022, the tool was acquired by Neil Patel, who has since expanded its capabilities and integrated it more closely with his wider suite of SEO tools.

The tool doesn’t pull information out of some proprietary analysis or index of sites. Rather, it uses autosuggestions from Google, Bing, YouTube, and Amazon to surface what users are actively looking for. This isn’t a new technique - marketers have been using suggested searches for years - but Answer the Public brings a form of visualization to the table that helps quite a bit with this content research.

You use the tool by plugging in a keyword - best just 1-2 words for the best results - and picking your target language and region before hitting search. A single seed keyword can generate a report with as many as 382 results, broken into five main categories.

When you plug in a keyword, the tool will take a few moments to search and compile data for you to use. You can view either a visualization or a data tab.

The visualization puts your keyword in the center and spirals out with prompts. In the case of Content Marketing, those prompts include Are, Will, Can, Which, Who, What, How, and a few others, and each of the prompts trails out to questions that showed up in autosuggest results. For example, with Content Marketing:

• Where > “content marketing where to start” > “Where to Start with Content Marketing”
• Are > “is content marketing pr” > “What is the Difference Between Content Marketing and PR?”
• Are > “what are content marketing strategies” > “Our Top 15 Content Marketing Strategies”
• Why > “why content marketing is bad” > “Why Content Marketing Isn’t Perfect”

The title ideas are my own - Answer the Public doesn’t generate them specifically. They basically present you with the data.

The results span questions, prepositions, comparisons, and alphabetical prompts. The “data” tab shows the results without the visualization, in case you want to export everything into a spreadsheet. You can download a CSV directly, which saves the copy-and-paste hassle entirely.

Drawbacks and Upgrades

One of the drawbacks to Answer the Public is that the free plan is fairly limited. Free users are capped at just 3 searches per day, which can be a bottleneck if you’re doing any volume of content research.

That raises the question: what does a paid plan offer, and is it worthwhile?

There are a couple of paid tiers worth learning about. The personal paid plan gives you 100 searches, supports 1 user and 1 project, and caps CSV exports at 25 per day. The Pro plan steps things up with support for as many as 3 users. But the Expert tier lets in unlimited team members - making it more a choice for bigger content teams.

Paid plans also unlock region and language targeting, which matters if you’re creating content for a specific geographic market instead of defaulting to broad results. You can save reports, download high-resolution versions of the visualizations, and access a cleaner, more filterable data experience.

There are also a couple of usability features in the Data tab. You can click to hide entire sections. For example, with Content Marketing, the “Can” section might surface results like “content marketing can take the form of quizlet” - not especially helpful. Just hide the whole section. You can also hide individual results within a section, and keep your data export clean and relevant whenever you download it.

Going back to some drawbacks, one thing Answer the Public doesn’t do is qualify the results. It simply records what the search engines recommend. Those suggestions, as we all know, don’t necessarily translate into useful topics. You need to do your own filtering, and you’ll probably want to use it alongside additional tools to check things like search volume and keyword difficulty.

How to Use Answer the Public Effectively

Now that I’ve doubtless convinced you of the power of this tool, how can you make use of it to spice up your blog?

The first thing you need to do is figure out keywords to use. There are plenty of guides on keyword research using a handful of different tools and brainstorming techniques. Just remember: stick to 1-2 word seed keywords when entering them into Answer the Public, as shorter inputs return the richest, most varied results.

Once you have a list of possible keywords, it’s time to plug them into Answer the Public. If you’re doing a high volume of research, you’ll hit the free plan’s 3-search-per-day cap quickly. In that case, it’s worthwhile to upgrade to at least the personal paid plan for the duration of your research sprint. You can always reassess your subscription once the heavy lifting is done.

You’ll likely have a pile of CSVs by the end of this step, which means you need to decide how you want to handle keeping your data organized. I personally like to maintain one master spreadsheet instead of a folder full of individual files, so it’s easy to work with the data all at once. How you organize it is up to you.

At this point, you’ll have data. But it’s mostly unfiltered. Now you have the tough job of getting rid of the worthless results. It’s easier if you use the filtering tools inside Answer the Public before you download the CSV. Use whichever option is more comfortable to you.

However you process the data, take your time. Remove duplicates and results that don’t mean anything. You’re not done filtering at this stage - this is a preliminary sort. Flag anything that seems potentially helpful but needs more research to follow up on.

Go ahead and do that secondary research to decide whether or not you want to keep a result, and consider rewriting it for clarity or using it as a topic angle.

Next you have to do some competitive research. For each keyword string, run a Google search and see what results pop up. You’re looking, primarily, at the existing content. Check:

• Is the existing content covering the topic as you understand it?
• Is the existing content high quality, or is it ranking well simply because there’s no competition?
• Is there a quirk to the results you didn’t expect that might change how you’d approach the topic?

Now filter the data again. Any keyword that has too strong a competition, little relevance, or some unexpected twist that disqualifies it should be removed or flagged as not helpful.

At this point, you should be left with a series of long-tail keywords that have potentially relevant topics attached to them. Your next filter is to go through the list and find anything you’ve already covered on your site. If you don’t have full awareness of everything you’ve ever published, you might want to do a content audit first. In some cases, you can refresh old posts with new keywords. But in others, you basically won’t have room for new content covering the same ground.

Now you have the fun job of going through these keywords and generating title ideas for your posts. This is going to need some creativity, and may mean referencing the Google search results to make sure that you’re not duplicating something already out there.

When coming up with titles, you should think outside the box. Don’t make everything a basic guide, a list of tips, or a top list. Put a spin on things and go for more advanced angles. You can even build something collaborative like “10 Experts Weigh In On [Topic]” and send out outreach emails until you have enough replies to publish.

Don’t forget these ideas can always be adapted into other formats as well. Even if the title doesn’t work well for a blog post, maybe an infographic would fit better, or maybe a sub-topic within a bigger related post. The ideas are yours to use however you like.

This process should leave you with a spreadsheet of anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand title ideas for blog posts. If that sounds like a lot of work, it is. If it sounds like a giant resource for making future content planning easier, it’s that too. If it sounds like something worth doing, visit Answer the Public and get started.