Why Answer The Public is even more important for SEO & Content Strategies in 2020

The main purpose of any successful SEO and Content campaign is to answer the questions of your audience. But how do you find out which questions your audience needs answers to?

At Koozai, we use a host of different tools, but to really identify those long-tail keywords we turn to Answer the Public.

What is Answer the Public?

Answer the Public is a clever consumer insight tool that combines the suggested searches from Bing and Google and visualises them in what could be called a search cloud. Organised in categories such as what, where and why, these search clouds provide an overview of the questions people are typing into search engines from their various devices.

This type of insight is invaluable for search marketers for the following reasons:

• It allows you to get to know your audience and understand what keeps them up at night
• It helps you target your keyword research
• It helps you optimise for long-tail key phrases
• It helps you answer questions that can get you into Google’s featured snippets

However, due to recent changes in Google algorithm announced in 2019 we have seen evidence that the need to rank for even more long-tail search queries has increased. If this free tool, wasn’t important already, then it’s now become essential!

All of which is down to Google’s BERT Update announced in October 2019.

What is Google’s BERT Update?

In simple terms, Google BERT helps a machine understand what the words in a sentence mean, but with all the nuances of context.

BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, and is a deep learning algorithm related to natural language processing.

Effectively, Google’s BERT will now understand more conversations and longer sentences containing keywords, to retrieve the correct content for its user.

Alternatives to finding long-tail keywords can always be found by using the likes of Google’s Keyword Tool Planner, however results are limited in terms of long-tail possibilities and are nowhere near as extensive as Answer The Public.

BERT has told us we need to improve how we optimise content for more conversational keywords and that’s where Answer The Public helps.

By Google’s own estimates, BERT update will affect over 10% of all search queries. That’s a high percentage, and one that SEO’s have not targeted in great detail until now.

Planning for 2020

Having a blog strategy in place has never been more important for brands in 2020, allowing them to utilise a platform that appeals to these longer tail questions and conversations taking place. Furthermore, there are several technical considerations from an SEO perspective. For example:

• Should we be creating new landing pages for these keywords / content themes?
• Do they internally link to content answering similar long-tail queries?
• Is the meta data for these pages optimised?

Ultimately, content relevancy continues to be an even bigger deal which has been spearheaded by BERT. It’s Answer The Public that then helps you understand what these queries will be (with the aid of other organic tools) and how to place your content and SEO efforts.

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