How to Use Answer the Public to Create Superior Content

Content marketing, in its ethical form, is setting up something which people will discover and adds esteem to the broad discussion. Content that is fruitful and engaging is likely to be shared and cited, drawing more traffic, which is why content marketers should dedicate a lot of time to creating high-quality output that will cut through the noise.

Constructive content marketing hinges on developing useful, attractive material but even the best article will go unread if it acknowledges a question that no one is asking. Thus, before you begin analyzing topics and throw titles, you need to know precisely what your target readers are looking for, and this is where Answer the Public comes into the room.  

What does Answer The Public do ?

One of the most athletic tools for hunting what people are searching for is Google’s autocomplete; having built up data from millions of searches it’ll forecast what you’re going to search, based on the information that’s already been entered.

It doesn’t take much time to decompile this and dope out what the most frequent searches are based on what Google suggests: “ Content marketing” suggests a few helpful ideas as the forecast, inferred that these are the most frequently explored topics.

You can also insert “wildcards” using_and*symbols, prodding Google to fill in the blanks in your query: 

The more alternatives we try,  the more mind’s eye we’ll have for content, and we can be self-reliant that there is search volume behind every query because they all give rise to questions which are actually being asked. Doing this manually is a long-winded approach, though, as you’re working though advice one by one.

Answer the Public is, fundamentally, an automated autocomplete tool; it follows the same process we’ve just outlined to analyze potential topics for content, trying out different alternatives of your keywords. The results are then displayed, separated according to the variations used to build them; the “why's” are separated from the “how's”, and appear in a downloadable image.

Answer the Public also generates suggestions based on words, such a “like”, “versus”, “with” and “without” as well as an alphabetical search which adds letters to the original query, listings the most common queries which use each letter.

Head of the topics

Answer the Public will provide you with many potential topics, but you don’t need thousands of ideas. Just a few immense ones. Separating the wheat from the chaff is the next step, by selecting the topics which will provide you with the most sake.

Elect a relevant topic

A big sake of content marketing is the potential to construct links to your site;  once you’ve created a highly-trafficked piece of content you want to earn a few juicy backlinks to your website’s services and product pages. That’s why you’ll want to pick a topic that can be easily connected to the pages you wish to promote. It’ll also need to be one to which you can provide an appropriate answer; people may be searching for “Content marketing fundamentals with Dayna Rothman”, but they probably won’t be fascinated in an article we write for this topic (since they’re exactly looking for Dayna Rothman and she doesn’t work for us LOL.)

For Example, we could take the topic “content marketing for b2b” from the above results, because this theme will link inborn to our own content marketing article. Not only will this improve organic traffic, but the “latent semantic indexing” (LSI) of the article will grant to the SEO for articles.

Can you compete ?

So we've found a question which is being asked, but how well is it being answered ? Well, let's disclose - feed the query into a google search and let’s see what comes up :

It looks like there are plenty of people providing articles about content marketing for B2B, and several articles which have been produced in the last few months. In essence, this question is already being thoroughly answered, so if we want our content to be discovered, we’ll need to find a question which isn’t so competitive. Let’s go back to Answer The Public and try feeding “content marketing for b2b” in, to see what variations on this search we can find.

The Need for Niche

This new query provides us with a new set of topics, which are more niche.  Not too niche, though - recall, these all have an appreciable search volume, or they wouldn’t have been returned by ‘the seeker’. Some of these, like the social media queries, are still hotly - contested, but the google results page for “content marketing in b2b financial services” is far less congested:

As you can see in the screenshot there are only two results that really match the query (“4 Business Tips for content marketing in b2b financial services  and ``10 content marketing tips for financial services companies ”); the others are more concerned with marketing in general. Because there are only two results which are really relevant to the search query, there’s much space for us to write an article that provides a better answer ; “Complete guide for effective b2b content marketing for financial services ”, for example.

Results - What have we achieved

What we’ve found is a gap in the market. Applaud to Answer the Public, we know that people are hunting for “content marketing in b2b financial services”, and from following this topic up with google search we know that the results they’re being displayed aren’t particularly acute. Now we can create an article which focuses on this topic, and because it’s relevant to our business.

Analyzing your topics like this is vital, as it let’s you create content which is likely to be read, shared and recommended - all huge positives for your SEO. Answer the Public gives you insight into how people are hunting for topical content and helps you create focused articles that grabs the eye ball’s of your readers.