Choosing the right search terms

How to choose the right seed terms in AnswerThePublic.com


The ongoing quality of what you put in to AnswerThePublic.com really dictates the ongoing quality of what you get out. And it’s easy to get it wrong and end up with results that just aren’t helpful (or no results at all)!

So, here are our top five tips for getting to solid customer insights:

1. Keep it simple. Use one or two seed terms, not full sentences or questions. If you enter something like ‘which moisturiser for dry skin’, you’re effectively asking AnswerThePublic.com to explore ‘where which moisturiser for dry skin’ and ‘will which moisturiser for dry skin’ and so on. Let AnswerThePublic.com.com do the work of finding questions for you.

2. Try multiple, similar inputs. You might think of your business focus in one way. Maybe it’s ‘flights’. But that doesn’t mean you should just explore ‘flights’ as a seed term with AnswerThePublic.com. Try ‘aeroplanes’, ‘airports’, ‘flying’ and ‘in-flight’ too. Explore everything related to your focus and think of all the verbs, adjectives and nouns that are relevant.

3. Avoid jargon. Don’t fall into the trap of using corporate language. Consider how other people search for your products or services or your brand. Input terms which reflect how your customers speak.

4. Think about ‘my’ versus ‘a’. Making nouns possessive brings back some really interesting stuff and will usually give you a different perspective. Sticking with ‘flights’, I’d suggest you try ‘my flight’ as well as ‘flights’. Think about how people actually use Google; think about how you actually use Google! You don’t stop searching once you’ve bought a flight, you might look for further information after booking, but the flight is now ‘yours’ so you’re going to search in a slightly different way.

5. Work with the prepositions. Get familiar with them and don’t use them in your seed terms. In other words, don’t bother entering things like ‘dresses for’. You just need to enter ‘dresses’ and the tool will surface all the ‘for’ terms for you.

If you want to learn more about using AnswerThePublic.com, you can find more tips in our handy, printable visual guide.