Search Listening: Exploring Google's different data sets

I'm Hannah from Answer the Public. I'm just doing a quick recap of what this webinar series is all about for everyone that's new. So each month we talk to industry experts from a whole range of backgrounds, from SEO and content to creative and PR, about how you can use search data to read people's minds and make better business decisions. So we will be showing you some different tools. Obviously, we'll be talking to you about Answer the Public and also Ask. Today, this isn't an Answer the Public tutorial. If you are looking for one of those, there's one over on our YouTube channel. So that's youtube.com/answerthepublic. And for those of you that have been on our previous webinars, there may be a few kind of hints and tips that we repeat just to help everyone that's new here for the first time today or new to search listening. But there will be a lot of brand new stuff, lots of key takeaways and learnings for all of you guys that have been here before as well. So today's conversation is all about exploring different Google datasets, and we've got 2 guests with us. So for those of you who are familiar to Sophie, we've got Sophie from Search Listening. She's also the author of Consumer Insight in the Age of Google, and she is the kind of originator of Search Listening as well. So hello to Sophie. I'll get you guys to introduce yourselves in a minute.

Hi.

And we've got a new guest with us today. So we're really happy to have Mark Williams-Cook from alsoasked.com. So Mark is the founder of that tool. It's a really great tool and we'll be talking to you all about that today. It's another one that you can use to really help with kind of search listening. So really looking forward to chatting to you about that. Yeah. Before we get started into questions, guys, can I hand over to you to introduce yourselves? Perhaps Mark, you can do that first. Sure.

Yeah, of course. Thank you. So thank you for having me. First off, it's a pleasure. So my name is Mark Williams-Cook, and as Hannah kindly said, I founded Also Asked back in November 2019. My, my kind of actual background, actually my day job is I'm director at a digital agency called Kanda. So Also Asked is actually like a side project that's grown very quickly. My background is I've got 16 years in SEO, some PPC in that, but mainly SEO. So I've had a lot of experience with kind of keyword research, content planning, link building, and helping. I've been really lucky. I've had a huge range of clients I've worked with from small kind of SMEs where near where I live up into people like Cheap Flights and Expedia, helping them with their SEO strategies over the years. So really fortunate and. Glad to be here and hopefully I can share something of value with everyone today.

I'm sure you definitely will. Thanks, Mark. Okay. And Sophie.

Hi everybody. If you've not come across me before on these webinars, so I'm Sophie Coley. I am also working in a digital agency over in the UK. I'm Director of Strategy at PropellerNet, but as I guess similar to Mark, I guess I've spent 11, 12 years now getting my head around search data. But I originally trained as a journalist. It's always struck me how much you can learn about people from how they behave online, which is where search listening came from. So I'm on a bit of a mission now to educate people beyond the search world as to the potential of search data. So working with the guys at Answer the Public, which obviously fell out of PropellerNet, and— Oh. He's also asked a lot as well in all the research that I do. So really excited to have Mark on the webinar today to talk through the different things that we can do with the different datasets.

Great, thank you, Sophie. I think you probably have seen Stella, who is helping us out today. Stella works on our Partner Talkall coverage book, but today she is being a moderator for the session. So if you've got any questions and things, please do put them in the chat. We will have some time for questions at the end of the session as well, but we will be keeping an eye out. So if there is anything that kind of relates to something that Sophie and Mark are talking about, There will be an opportunity while the session is happening too. And do remember, we've obviously paused on this slide for a second for to use to share on Twitter. We've got our handles there. So Mark is @alsoasked and @thetapperboy. I'm Hannah, so I'm @answerthepublic or @hannahmfoster. And Sophie is @searchlistening or Cool. Let's go straight in then to the first question. So we actually get asked this a lot. It comes up a lot on kind of Twitter, and I know that you do as well, Mark. So we'll kick off by asking, what is the difference between the data you're given in alsoasked.com and the data that you're given in answerthepublic.com, and how can the two tools complement?

Yeah, this really makes me smile, this question, because out of everything people could ever ask me about the tool, this is literally the number one question I get asked, or just how is it different. And I think it— first off, it's very different, and I'll go through how in a moment. But I think the confusion comes from, for those familiar with Arts for the Public, That kind of graphical tree way that they represent keyword data, which is really good, really helpful. And I think that's almost what they're known for in a way, because we're now, we've got a similar approach. It, they get mixed up. So for those, um, that haven't used Also Asked before, or maybe even Answer the Public, they do actually use 2 totally different sets of keyword data. So Answer the Public is primarily using what's called Google Suggest data, and that has an API you can use. And you've probably all seen it before, which is when you start typing something into Google, it's going to give you suggestions for how you might like to finish your query. And Answer the Public actually goes quite a few steps more than this because they put in things like comparisons. So I've done One here. So if you've done a search, maybe on Answer the Public and just type Bitcoin, they'll do Bitcoin versus and bring in then the intent for comparison, for instance. So it saves a huge amount of time. I won't go into that too much. So I'm sure Sophie's got a lot to say about that as well. Also Asked is more my expert area. And Also Asked actually covers, as it says on the tin, these people also ask. Boxes that are generated in Google. So again, I imagine everyone's seen them. When you do a search query, sometimes you get this additional box, um, that has questions which are related to your first search, and they're derived from things people also ask around that search. And the kind of interesting thing about this is we can build out these multi-level trees. So this is one generated from the search term Bitcoin, and I've had to crop off half of this just to show you the amount of data, because what will happen here is if you do a search for Bitcoin, this first level of the tree shows you essentially what is in this box here. Now, if you've used People Also Ask before, you'll know when you click on these, what happens is apart from getting the kind of snippet answer for these, it will actually generate then related questions to the term that you've clicked in context to the original search. And that's what we attempt to do at these next 2 levels, which is say, okay, if someone clicked on what will Bitcoin be worth in 2020, we get what are the related questions to this and can a Bitcoin crash? And then we get the related questions to that. And I think this is why we have this confusion because we have this similar data. I don't know if you've got anything to add to that, Sophie. I don't know if I've done Answer the Public justice there.

Yeah, yeah, no, I don't think there's loads more to add. Like you said, I understand why people get confused visually. They're very similar. I think they're equally as useful, certainly in the consultancy work that I do around search listening and just more broadly around digital marketing, I use both of them. I suppose what I really love about Also Ask, which is the key difference for me between Also Ask and Answer the Public, is the kind of tree version of it and the mapping and the journey that you can go on almost. You can almost see where someone started and then the rabbit holes, as I often call them, that they go down following different searches as suggested by Google. I imagine I will say it a few times throughout this webinar today, but the thing for me is that whether it's suggestions that you're seeing from Google or the People Also Ask boxes, ultimately it's Google observing other people's search behaviours. Google's end goal always is to get you as a user to the best search result for whatever it is you're looking for as quickly and efficiently as possible. And I suppose it's developed things like People Also Asked and the suggestions In, in a bid to speed that up for people and to improve their experience. They're both really interesting, rich datasets, and they are both observations based on what Google is seeing, how people are searching. They're just served up in slightly different ways. Yeah, my biggest thing would be people should pay attention to both of them, really.

Yeah, we certainly use them at different stages in, in our kind of process as well. One, one thing I thought was interesting, so this was from an SEMrush study was that these people also asked boxes appear on 50% of a sample they took. I think it was of a million searches. So half the time you'll get these people also ask results come up and 86% of the time on a question search. And obviously question searches are attached to almost everything that we do online. There's normally a question search in there somewhere. And as well, the greatest proportion of time those boxes are appearing in the top 3 results. So Google's really dangling it under people's noses. And I think what's— we talk about intent a lot when we talk about keyword research and trying to get into the mind of, okay, someone has searched for this keyword or this key phrase, what do they want? And I think part of the problem that people also ask boxes solve is for when Google is not sure about the intent, because they can be used as intent refinement. So the example I gave there was there's a bunch of searches around Bitcoin, for instance, and by putting these boxes near the top, Google can say, actually, what is it you want to know about this? Are you interested in investing in it or how it started? So I think it solves a problem for Google, for users. And helps everyone along the way from that. And I think you raised a really good point saying that both these tools as well are just presenting data from Google. They've got a lot of value because it would take ages to do all of this manually and to go and, you know, copy and paste them all out. And I think we've got in here an example. So again, for those that haven't seen it, that's actually an Answer the Public result. So it's really easy if you don't go into depth to see why you you might be confused between these 2 datasets, because they do look quite similar when they're laid out like that.

They do, yeah. And I think another point worth noting here is just, obviously, you get a lot of data. I think one of the other real strengths of AlsoAsked that I love is that you get those kind of 2 steps, what's related to what. We get asked a lot about prioritisation with the data you get back from Answer the Public, because you get so much of it. Whereas I think with People Also Asked, and then AlsoAsked surfacing that data, actually get like the really top, topmost visible queries that are being surfaced back to users. It gives you a really good kind of focused starting point. And I think the other thing is I definitely will play with the two. I can use Answer the Public sometimes and find interesting questions and then go and plug those back into Also Asked. It's really nice. We've, I know we've done webinars previously talking about combining social and search data, but I would also encourage people to explore combining different search datasets as well, because you might see something in one or the other, and then either tool will help you to blow up and explode that theme and that topic.

Yeah.

What I guess the final thing I'd say about them in comparison without going in depth about it is my own sort of personal keyword research approach is I use Answer the Public for terms higher up in the search, what, you know, the search demand curve. So this is this idea that generally the broader searches that might have higher volume and sometimes broader intent will, will have lots of searches per month. And Answer the Public is really good at breaking out the topics in these searches. So I tend to use it for, okay, we've got this whole category we want to write about. What topics should we consider? And then my first port of call will be something like Answer the Public, and then I'll get an idea for, okay, these are the 10 topics that we're interested in. What I then use Also Asked for is once we've decided, okay, we're gonna write this specific article in this topic, is to use Also Asked to then probe into what other things should be included in the article. So when I've seen a few people saying, oh, which is better, Answer the Public or Also Asked, or which should I use? And it's, to me, it's a bit like saying which is better. Like a hammer or a screwdriver, you know, they both have their own individual cases. If you use them properly, they're complementary because they're different datasets. If they were using the same data, then of course there might be an argument to which is better because of speed, cost, whatever. But that's just not the case.

Yeah.

I think it's a funny one, isn't it? Because I guess the SEO world, the traditional SEO world for so long has been like fixated on keyword research, which, uh, what we're talking about here, but I suppose traditional keyword research is very much like you were saying, top of— sorry, bottom of the funnel, commercially focused keywords that people can buy advertising on. And we're really playing in a different space here with long-tail stuff. And I can see the question that we always get asked, and I know Mark and I have spoken about this in terms of volumes with this sort of stuff, which gets tricky. There's things you can do, but actually sometimes it's not about the volumes. Sometimes it's just about recognizing that these are really niche and relevant opportunities for you, whether it's from a content point of view or something else.

Great. Thanks guys. I'm just going to jump in and ask a few questions before we move on to the next question, because it's slightly a different topic, but a few are coming through about the particular tools. So the first one is for Mark. So does Also Ask offer a free version so people can have a go?

Yeah.

So actually the whole tool is free at the moment. We launched what we defined as the alpha version in November 2019, which again was totally free and This January, we released what's now called the beta version, which is we think we're pretty much there in terms of features and in terms of more importantly stability. So we're supporting around about a million visitors a month now. So there's quite a lot of searches happening that we need to support. So all of that's in place and we have this ongoing, what we have called open beta, which means you can sign up. And it's completely free. You get 1,000 searches for the whole month. You can do bulk uploads. The plan is there will always be some free amount you can do. It will become a paid-for tool at some point because to be quite honest, it costs us a fair bit of money to run. We can't just do that forever. There will always be a kind of freemium version. So at the moment, if you don't log in. You can do, I think it's 10 searches, um, a month. If you sign up, then you get some more like export functions unlocked. And again, that's gonna remain free. And the paid versions are really about 2 things, which is volume. So if you're doing sort of hundreds of searches a month, then there'll be a small monthly charge for that. And then there'll be a slightly higher tier, which are for those people that want to do bulk searches. So there's the ability. to upload like a CSV with 200 terms or 100 terms on it, and then it will just work away and email you all the results there. So again, that's higher load on our end, but absolutely now, if you want to give it a go, make hay while the sun shines, as the saying goes, it is free.

Lovely. That's great. Thank you. The next question I can answer on behalf of Answer the Public. So someone's asked if you can see the data over time to see how questions associated are changing. We have got a feature in Answer the Public. It is a pro feature. So obviously we've got the free version in which you can do a kind of handful of searches a day. We have got a pro version of Answer the Public where you can track changes over time. It's called Search Listening Alerts, is the name of the feature. And you set up scheduling on a keyword and you'll get weekly emails, which will let you know how that kind of search behavior has changed over that particular week, or you can just go in manually and reschedule one of your reports. But that is a Pro feature, it's just recently launched. And I know we were talking about this, Mark, when we were planning this webinar earlier in the week, and I think that maybe something coming for Also Asked.

Yeah, that's right. So one of the features we are looking to add in, like, our phase 2 will be around tracking how the questions change over time. And I think I'll talk more about that later, but essentially I think there is some value in, in tracking these changes because it is representative of the collective mindset. At least it's holding a mirror up to what kind of searches are happening, what kind of questions, uh, people are asking. And I think that can be useful from a broader strategic view when you're thinking about your marketing, your messaging, and the information you're giving people.

Brilliant. Thank you. Someone's just jumped in and asked about the 2 different data sources. So Answer the Public uses Google's auto-suggest data, and People Also Asked uses the also asked data from Google. So yeah, someone also asked where the data In AutoR is from. Is it UK-based or can you get other countries at the moment?

Yeah, so there's a localization options on AutoR. So if you go to the site, you'll see you can select both language and region, and these are just reflective of the language and region options that are available in Google. So all of those combinations are available in terms of there is a regional and a language version of Google. Each of those regional and language versions of Google show different results. So some common feedback we might get from AutoAsk is, oh, it doesn't work in Poland, say. And the reason will be is they've typed in a query, a question, a subject, and it says that there's no results. So my advice is always just go to Google. In that country, in your country, do that search and see if it does generate a People Also Ask box. Because in every single case so far, it's been the case that it hasn't. So the interesting thing about the People Also Ask boxes is Google definitely has a bias to English in terms of their algorithms and their training. And they roll out new features generally in English, especially in the US first. So People also ask boxes are definitely more prevalent in English. So it absolutely supports all regions and all languages that Google does. We just unfortunately don't have control over which results Google provides People Also Ask data for and which they don't. And I had a similar question about asking us if we censored certain searches, because again, it wasn't showing results. And again, I said, this is really a question for Google. If you don't like there aren't people also asked results.

That's a really good point. I find the same on Answer the Public, or sometimes you'll just find something really random in the data and someone will be like, but why is this showing up? And I think it's a really good point to remember both tools are just collecting Google data at scale and making it much easier for you to work with it and observe it. But yeah, we don't control any of the data that is being collected.

Don't shoot the messenger.

Exactly.

Great, thanks guys, that was really interesting. If we go on to the next question then. So what other datasets can you get from Google and how do you use them?

Sure, so this question for me is just a chance for us to highlight— if I come back to the premise of this webinar, right, people talk about Google data and it's quite a broad abstract thing. So what we've tried to show you already in the 2 tools that we've talked about is one type of Google data is the People Also Ask boxes, which also ask surfaces for you. Another type of Google data is Google Suggestions, which answer the public surfaces for you. But other kind of sources of Google data that, that people in search will know and use, I imagine— Google Trends is obviously a really great one. It has some different features, surfaces different things. The bit I particularly like in Google Trends is If you scroll down beyond— so if you go into Google Trends, you'll typically get like a line graph at the top of the page. If you scroll down a bit, it will give you a kind of rising trends table, which gives you some specific search queries that are really popular or spiking in popularity for the time period of your report. For me, that's a bit of an underrated other kind of Google data source. And then the other one is Google's Key Web Planner, which for me is The traditional choice, if you like, that certainly people on the paid side of the search marketing industry are very reliant on. I'd say also the natural search side of things as well will use Google's Keyword Planner or a variant of that tool. It has its limitations inasmuch as you will only get access to good data if you're spending money in the platform. Very, very clever, Google. But we were talking about this and quite often if you've not got an active account, you'll get told that there's 0 to 10,000 searches a month, which is as good as saying someone's searched for this at some point, pick a number. So Google's Keyword Plan is great if you're looking at more commercial keywords, I think. Google Trends is great if you're trying to understand rapid spikes in changes in search behavior. But they're 2 completely different datasets again that I would add to People Also Asked and the Google suggestion boxes. There's one more that I'd add, and this is reflective of— I've had lots of people recently asking me about, can you apply search listening to YouTube, or does Answer the Public pull in YouTube data? It doesn't specifically, would be my answer, but actually Google the functionality of sort of Google suggests, as it is in google.co.uk or .com or whatever variation of the website you're using, is exactly the same in YouTube. You can see here I've just put how to, and what I'm getting here is probably the top how-to searches that people are making looking for video content specifically in YouTube. So it's, it's a really similar process. There isn't a tool that kind of automates this as far as I know at the moment, but it's exactly the same thing, right? We're Google is observing how people are searching within YouTube and they're serving up the suggestions to help people get to the most popular content more quickly. So if you're planning video content, again, this might be a really useful thing for you to observe. Yeah. I don't know if there's any, if you've got any thoughts on any of those data sources or anything else that you're a fan of, Mark.

Yeah, I think you've done a really good job covering that. In terms of stages at when we use these types of data coming from an SEO slant kind of point of view. The Keyword Planner for me is really valuable when we're involved in design and build of sites, because having an idea, even if it's just of a comparative amount of searches that are happening, can help us inform what our main categories should be on a site. So this is all about getting search and this data involved during a site build. And the premise here is that your pages that are linked to high up, if you like, in your hierarchy, that is in your main menu, will tend to be your strongest pages because the, the kind of the abstract of the logic the search engine applies is, well, this is linked to on every page one, one link away, so it must be really important. So if you had a competitive category you're trying to rank for, you don't want that to be like a third-level subcategory or something. So that's really helpful and completely right in terms of Google making you pay for this data. There is a browser plugin that I use called Keywords Everywhere, and this does allow you to get around this, this bucketing of data. So it'll give you more accurate, or as if you were paying money in Google Ads, search volumes. And it also breaks out some things like related searches. And what's really cool is it overlays it when you do a Google search. This Keywords Everywhere tool will just say, okay, well, there's this many monthly searches for that. And again, just to put out a couple of warning flags around search volume data, it's important firstly, if you're looking at search volume data, to look at the monthly The monthly volumes for that data. If you just did a search on Keywords Everywhere and you were like, oh, okay, the searches for this search term are 3,000 a month. That's great. And you didn't bother looking at the search volume or you didn't look at Google Trends. It might well be that month was a particular spike for whatever reason. And therefore you've just ruined everything because you forecasted on 3,000 a month. There's some nice ways to do this with Google Trends. So when you put a keyword into Google Trends. Apart from getting trend data for single keywords, it allows you to search topics as well, which are groups of keywords that Google think are related. And this can be helpful if you've, say, got a group of 200 keywords and you're trying to do some forecasting and you don't want to have to go in, or there isn't enough data to check individually how these keywords trend. You can use Google Trends to see how that subject area changes over the year and just apply that to a group of keywords because it's a bit quick and dirty. And in fairness, a lot of forecasting is, if we're honest, but it will give you much better data. So I, I used Bitcoin as a really nice example here because that's had some really odd spikes in search volume that have been attached to it. Its presence in the news and the sort of national consciousness. So if you were doing keyword research and content about that, you certainly wouldn't forecast based on, if you were doing it in January 2017 or January 2018, the huge volumes we saw in the previous December. So search data, I think is really important to, to, or to overlay those 2 types. The only other place I would add to go is. There is now a service, if you like, called Google Question Hub, and that's available at questionhub.withgoogle.com. As far as I'm aware, it's only available in the US, Nigeria, India, and— and India. I think they're the 3 or 4 places it's available. And what this Question Hub does is it actually highlights where Google can't find good results for specific questions. So this is going into the super long grass, long tail. And the reason I think it's been launched in those countries specifically is similar to how I mentioned earlier. I think, I know there is definitely a content availability issue, if you like, in sometimes other languages outside of English, which is just that there isn't as, as broad a choice for Google to choose from. So they have more of these gaps in search. So especially if you're active in these areas. It's really good to just get an idea of actually that there's a complete gap here if you do some content around this. The thing about Also Asked is while it gives you this really great insight, the reason there are People Also Ask results is because there is some content to match you up with. So you are gonna have to beat that content if you like in some way in terms of quality or relevance or however. But the Question Hub does give you. Even though it's very much kind of grassroots, small search terms, subjects where there isn't any coverage yet. So it's, it's worth checking out if you're not in the— I've got the list here. It's US, India, Indonesia, Nigeria. If you're not in one of those locations, you can sign up for a notification of, of when it goes live in your area. And I, um, do hear it works if you have a VPN as well and you pretend you're from one of those countries. Apparently.

Sneaky. Someone told you.

Someone told me.

I would just add on Keywords Everywhere, like it's the best way to get volume data on any of the tools that we've been talking about. I do always like to give my caveat and my flag that just because Keywords Everywhere also will sometimes tell you Answer the Public data and also Ask data is zero searches a month, it's actually just that it's It's not a commercial keyword. So it's not, I think it's useful sometimes to think of keyword volume data is intended traditionally to inform advertisers online. So it's to tell you where to spend your money on adverts. And therefore, if the terms that you're trying to understand the volume of aren't particularly advertising friendly, i.e., they're not red shoes where someone's actually going to buy the thing. I think sometimes then you need to take the volumes with a pinch of salt because the data exists. I think it's just one dataset that Google doesn't give us. And it's something I've long talked about with them, search listening. I would love us in a few years, sooner than that would be great, but I'd love us to be in a place where Google released volumes for all sorts of keyword research. I think there's as much value for us to be had as marketers with understanding volumes of long tail and conversational search behavior as there is commercial, but ultimately the keyword volume tools that exist at the moment are commercially focused. I think it's fair to say.

Yeah, I think the other point there that reinforces that is where, if we do a check for a specific key phrase in one of these tools, there's probably 100 different ways that I could ask the same question. Using a different combination of words or even adding UK on the end. And Google has got very good with their recent algorithm updates. BERT, for instance, is around understanding the intent of a query. So you don't have to like match the exact question on the page for you to appear, right? So if you type in a question to one of these tools and it says, oh, there's zero searches a month and you write it off and you go, oh, nobody's asking that. It might be that, yeah, there was a— Google may have only 5 searches a month for that term, but there's 100 different ways that that question is asked. So actually there's 500 searches a month, but you've now missed that opportunity. Absolutely. I've been in two minds about, because we've had requests for it to include search volume data on also asked results. And I've said to people that. I don't know if I want to because 95% of them, I tell you, will either say 20 or they will say 0. And if you're looking at that, you're missing the point of what it's there for. So it's there to improve your content, to make you aware of the different questions people are asking. You shouldn't be deciding whether or not you create content in the first place. The fact that the questions are there is evidence that people are typing them in and I've had feedback as well from the tool saying, oh, you've listed these 2 questions and they're either a duplicate or they're very similar. And again, that highlights the point that, yes, it's the same intent. It's just 2 ways of typing that question. I think that the kind people at Keywords Everywhere are adding support for also asked anyway, so it will overlay the search volume, but yeah, very much strongly advocate for basically just ignoring it and going with what you feel for that.

The, the adage I give there is think of any sort of Google data, and I think this is applicable to also Ask and Answer the Public. It's like the biggest focus group you could ever do, and you're not going to just disregard something because one person said it. If it's there, it should be interesting and you should act accordingly.

Great, thank you guys. Yeah, really interesting. Again, lots of questions coming through, but I think we're just going to hold on to them to the end. So the last question of the session is, how do you make use of all this data? So you've obviously talked through loads and loads of different tools, so there's lots of different data sources. So how do you bring it all together and make it useful for the insight that you're trying to get to?

Wow, so many different ways. So I think At the very, yeah, at the very basic level, we have a set process we go through, as I said, with different tools at different stages. So it might be if we're building a new section of the site, we do get that top-level volume data. And then when we're planning out topics, we'll use something like, uh, Answer the Public to get those. And then at the, the article level, we'll use Also Asked. But I think there's so much. More interesting things you can do with this data. So I'll give you, um, 2 examples for Also Asked data specifically. So the, the first one, which we touched on earlier, is actually monitoring for changes of those questions. And I think this is a big trick that a lot of people are missing. It's something that we are going to add as a feature, but it's something you can already be doing if you just change this And this, I first tested this with the Mandalorian series that came out on Disney. So I, when I first Googled Mandalorian, there was no People Also Ask. And then I think within a few days of the first episode being aired, we had questions like, uh, who is Baby Yoda? And just 3 questions. And now if you do it, there's this huge tree again, and they were growing almost as every episode came out and people have more questions. So this got me thinking, oh wow. This actually updates really quickly, and it's almost like a zeitgeist, an insight into what people are asking now. And throughout any marketing cycle, when you're defining your— you've got your product and you're thinking about who the audience is, what they want to know— not every client we have or we've engaged with, for instance, is right for SEO because there might be an issue where you have your customer And the customer doesn't know what they don't know. To give you an example of this, we dealt with an insurance company that specialized in insurance for Airbnb because they said most people don't know their standard house insurance likely does not cover them for having Airbnb guests. Okay. And we can't really do an SEO campaign for Airbnb insurance at the time because nobody was searching for it because they don't know they had that problem. So looking at people also ask around insurance gives you these, okay, this is where we need to get in when people are doing this research about insurance. And then we make them aware at the next stage that they have a problem. And then people go into this, I'm asking questions to find solutions for this problem. And then once those solutions become known within As the product, as the offering matures, you then get comparison type behavior. Okay, I know I have this problem. It's a known thing. I know there are some solutions. How do I compare them? And then the final kind of stage is when people start comparing brands. So it's like, okay, I know I want this solution, but is brand A or brand B better for whatever reason? And you can actually track that lifecycle over different bits of search data, but certainly, certainly also asked. And the, the second use, which I find really interesting, and I'd say to be very honest, it's slightly out of my skillset 'cause it's quite specialized, but it's around sentiment analysis. So you can, we are gonna again offer an API for Also Asked. And again, it's something you can do already because you can download the, the CSV data for this, but there's lots of off-the-shelf sentiment analysis Stuff you can get in Python, for instance, that will take the raw data in and you can start monitoring the feeling that is going with these questions. And this can be about your brand as well. So lots of big brands have PAA questions like, why is this company bad? Or why are they a scam, for instance? And the same with products. And there's a couple of different types. You can do sentiment analysis, you can do classification. So looking at what types of questions people are asking and monitor that over a long period to again, build into your marketing. So you get an idea, then you can plot, this is where the cloud of people are in terms of understanding of our product, our solution, and this is how they're feeling about the brand and the products. And at a strategic level, that's, I think, hugely powerful. And it's, I think it's almost at the other end of certainly where I've naturally grown up in terms of marketing, which is very much the sharp point of the performance end of how many clicks, what do they cost, and how many are we going to sell, which is what a lot of people are interested in. But there's so much strategic value in this more generic, general approach to search.

Yeah, massively. And I think that's the mission I'm on. It struck me quite recently that people who work in search are gatekeepers to incredible data that quite often in a lot of companies, the data doesn't live beyond the search department from that kind of performance point of view. And actually, I guess, thinking about different channels and activations of the data, I work with businesses that are using search to inform product development, i.e., spotting that a certain type of, a certain shape of handbag, for example, might be being searched for and they don't have it. So actually, should they be creating that product? So that's a really interesting use for me, even through to, I think, really interesting that you were talking about the sentiment analysis of this search behavior, because I think that spins you out into really rich, interesting comms territory in as much as, yes, brand reputation, definitely. I always show people just the Google suggestions around, does Space use slave labor, child labor, palm oil? People have these perceptions of brands and they'll show up in the People Also Ask boxes, they show up in the Google suggestions. So I always strongly believe that if anyone is working in any sort of role where a brand reputation is part of their remit, then they shouldn't be ignoring search data. But my gut feel is that the majority look to social because yes, it's a more overt— people project their opinions and stuff can spread like wildfire if there is an issue. But equally, if it's showing up in search, you would want to know about it. I think that's an interesting point, the People Also Ask boxes and Google's suggestions, yes, they're reflections of consumer thought and sentiment and feeling. They also inform opinion. Someone may just be searching around a brand and then see that question, as you've said, in the People Also Ask box of like, why are they a scam? And they haven't even thought that this company might be a scam, but all of a sudden Google's planted that seed and they're thinking, oh, maybe they are, like maybe I won't visit them. So really important to think of it from that point of view. But Some of my other sort of favorite uses of this, it's probably worth anyone who's interested in this looking back through some of our other webinars on YouTube, as Hannah said, because I think we've started to dip our toe into different industries and their approach to search data, but around PR and creative comms is really interesting as well. I think we see more and more PR stories, even in the digital PR world, of people using search data to say, as a proxy for public opinion. I know at PropellerNet, we ran a story recently, which was Where do people want to move to in the world? So it was looking at people in the UK searching for things like, how do I move to America? And that's because you can use search data as a proxy for public sentiment effectively. And you get that into a PR story and it's gold dust because journalists aren't always— there are a bunch who are great with search data, but well, they're very busy. At least we know that. But they're always very grateful to receive a nice sort of smart data story, which is exactly what this is. So yeah, there's countless uses of search data. And my, my sort of rallying cry always when we do these webinars is if you're someone who works with search data, start making friends with other people in your business and seeing how they could make use of your data, not necessarily from a performance point of view. It would be useful from a performance point point of view, but think of this data as really rich kind of audience knowledge because everyone wants to know more about the people that you're trying to target.

Yeah, I think one or two last slides I wanted to show because I think they're really neat examples about the kind of traps this data can set as well is this is the trend for the search term Halloween between 2004 and now in the UK. And as, as you'd expect. Near Halloween is the 2-week run-up. There's a huge spike. Now, if you have your kind of site off peak, if you like, and you think this is brilliant, we're going to get loads of traffic come Halloween. What's really interesting about this particular search result is that Google actually changes the results drastically in those weeks. So if you do a search now for Halloween, I suspect you will get Wikipedia, which will give you some background about Halloween. Probably information about the film Halloween. In the run-up to Halloween, if you search for Halloween, generally you find lots of e-commerce sites ranking because the intent has changed and people actually want to buy Halloween tat, like witch hats and decorations and stuff. So I think that's interesting as well. It's just another dimension to this data and about how intent is not static. So you can't just take the term Halloween and say, oh, the intent is this because it does morph over time. And we see that over lots of different keywords. And to continue my example of Bitcoin, cause I just think it's an interesting search term. So this is the search volume over the last 5 years. And what's really interesting is obviously we had this, people probably everyone was aware, had this huge rally at the end of 2017 and then a spike. At the end of 2019. When we compare that to the price, it's reflected apart from this latest rally, but up until this point, almost identically by the search volume. So there's so many uses to this data and correlations between real-world impact and how we actually see people using Google. And again, if you're interested in this, there's lots of studies done around voting behavior as well. and volumes of candidates and using that as a predictor for who might win elections.

And the book, every, I always drop this every webinar, but if anyone's not read Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, that's got a load of great stuff around voting behavior.

So yeah, there's just these extra dimensions. And like Sophie said as well about the, about people use Google, I think, as a proxy for trust as well. So this. seeding the idea of I search for a brand and it asks, is it a scam? I've seen so much data when they've been polling, uh, in the UK adults around basically they will trust companies that rank highly in Google because they trust Google to do a good job. So having Google suggest that your brand is a scam or your product is bad is really bad for you. Like really bad.

Yeah, definitely. I think I'd probably just end on. The kind of seasonality of search is a whole nother fascinating area that I think you could probably do a whole nother webinar on, but it's a really good reminder. And again, maybe a takeaway for people from the webinar is just don't ever see this as job done, tick, you've done your search research and that's it. You've got everything you need to know. Yeah, this is, you need to be checking this regularly. We see it. I always give a really morbid example here, but if a big, like, celebrity name died, you would see search suggestions change. That afternoon, effectively. Like, how did die? What happened? Google observes consumer search behavior in real time, and it updates the search suggestions, and it updates the people also ask boxes in real time because it wants to be as useful as quickly as possible. Things change. I think there's a stat that like 15% of searches every day are completely new as well. So it's Google is observing all of that and trying to. feed it back to people. So yeah, never see this as job done. This is something that really you need to be checking in on. I think gold standard is sort of weekly. That's difficult for a lot of people, but equally Public Pro has the kind of search alerts now, so you can start tracking stuff and get alerted when new stuff's coming. And it sounds like that's coming for Also Asked as well, which it's making everyone, I would hope, who's on this webinar's lives easier in terms of doing that regular checking in on the data. Yeah, that's a gift to you in terms of the alerts.

Great, thank you so much, guys. I think we'll move on to questions now because we've only got about 10 minutes left. We've also already had some really nice feedback coming through. So someone was saying this is the best webinar I've been on in a while. So thank you to you both. It was super, super interesting, and I know I've picked up a lot of Tips and stuff from what you've both been saying. Yeah, if anyone's got any questions, please get them in now. I'm just going to start running through some of, um, them that came through while the guys were talking. So first of all, this one's from Mark. Do you have a feeling for how many people need to ask a question before it appears in Google's People Also Ask section?

No, it's the honest answer to that. My guess, and this is a guess, would be that there isn't a raw volume. It's going to be a decision based on all kinds of, all kinds of data signals Google's getting. So we mentioned there around if a celebrity dies, it's not so much how many searches are there, it's that there's gonna be a huge delta change in the amount of people doing that search. And Google's gonna— so Google has a very— the best way I think to think about this is Google very much now leans into what they call an entity-based approach to search, which is they are trying to— the, the quote they had from, I think it was 11 years ago, was things, not strings, which is they're trying to understand what things are and the relationship between them. As an example, If you Google something like Brad Pitt, you'll get a little knowledge box come up. And this information is stuff that Google has assembled, and it knows that Brad Pitt is a person who is an actor, and actors are in things called movies and TV shows. And these are the movies and TV shows that Brad Pitt has been in. Nobody has like explicitly gone to Google and typed that in. It's worked this out because it knows what these things are. And I think. What we will have into, and that's how it answers complex questions actually. So if you type in who is the founder of Warner Brothers or something, that's a complicated question for a computer to answer because it has to understand what a founder is and that is a person and people found companies. So I think that's all tied into what questions, it's more what questions people are asking about entities. So some entities themselves may have low search interest, so it won't take many searches to trigger. Questions around it. And I think, as we mentioned the example earlier, sometimes that's why you get really weird stuff appear. For something like Nike, for instance, that will have some PAA boxes, some people also asked. And if I go and get 1,000 people to Google why are Nike trainers rubbish, I don't think that's going to appear as a PAA. So I don't think there's a raw number. It's going to be contextual to the type of entity, to the normal search volume, and a It's going to be on new signals and a whole bunch of stuff that Google's doing. I'm sorry I can't give you an easy answer to that. And I wish there was an easy answer to that because I would, I would use that knowledge.

It's one of Google's good secrets that they keep, isn't it? But yeah, I imagine it's rapid shifts, like rapid significant shifts in consumer searches.

Great. Thank you. Okay. So the next one, is it better to Check the Google suggestions in an incognito tab.

Yes, always. Yeah. It's one of the kind of watchouts that I often give. If you're looking at Google suggested data, if you don't do it in an incognito tab, you will suddenly think, oh, everyone searches exactly like I do. Because Google will be replaying your searches back to you effectively and pulling in all the ways that you've behaved. So jump into an incognito tab. Obviously, if you're using Answer the Public, then you don't need to do that because It's pulling it in anonymously, not necessarily from your sort of browser and your behavior yourself. Yeah. But incognito tabs, I'd imagine, is that the same for also asked as well?

It's slightly different. So the question I think around personalization comes up loads around search. And I think Google uses a fairly limited, but quite focused amount of personalization. So especially if you have a home assistant, like voice assistant, and you're like, When was Tina Turner's last album released? And then you could ask a follow-up question, like say, when did she die or something?

Yeah.

It would figure out what you're asking about cuz of your very close proximity search. So you're definitely affecting then suggest less. I've seen less so with PAA, but my advice would be always do it anyway in an incognito tab because We don't know for sure. And it depends on how your Google account is set up because there's all kinds of different options and signals you can give Google. And it's a complete warren if you try and actually read through their terms of service and what they're doing with data, maybe partially intentionally, it's quite hard to get to the bottom of that. So always, and again, this is what these tools exist for. You don't have to worry about that if you use Answer the Public or AlsoAsked, you can just put it in and you don't have to worry about personalization skewing your data.

Yeah.

Great, thank you. Okay, so next, really interesting question here. So, is there a way to separate out information while using Answer the Public and also Ask? So the example given is, if I search for a Christian, as in Christianity, topic and it pulls up Christian Dior, as in the brand, which is not what I meant, is there a way to fix that?

So, I think this touches on something that Mark said earlier, actually, which is that, I guess, one, the data you get back in Answer the Public and Also Asked is Google's data. And it means that those are suggestions that are being surfaced, or the People Also Ask boxes that are appearing when people perform those searches. So, the fact that you're getting confusing or slightly off-topic results would suggest that that's what Google is serving to people as well. So yeah, I think Mark talked about it earlier, but you need to refine your search a little bit more. There will be ways you can jump to a slightly more refined query. The things that I like to look at— so I imagine another example that probably touches on this would be like Religion, which is a clothing brand as well, or used to be. I don't know if it's still going, but also people would refer to their own religion. The word my becomes quite useful in Answer the Public a lot of the time for those sorts of queries, because you can You're changing and making the intent really overt if you say my religion. So you get a different set of queries. So there's often little words that I find that you can use to make it really obvious or make it more specific. That's what you're looking at. Again, you might look at Christianity rather than Christian or a Christian. I suppose you'd probably still get a Christian Dior bag or something that would come up from a Christian, but start to think about the little words that you can add on around that to really make it clear if you have got one of those kind of more ambiguous words that you're looking at?

I think my response to that would be that there's nothing to fix because it gives you a really good insight into maybe the intent is not as you assumed. And I think it's a really easy trap to fall into when you work in a specific area. You think of the keywords as just to do with you, but actually outside of that, what the reality of what's happening is That might not be the case. So my first port of call is actually doing a Google search for that and seeing which results come up. So is it in that case, are the pages all about religion? Um, or are they about bags or the brands? So, because there's lots of instances where you may not be the majority intent for a particular key phrase. And in those situations, I think you need to pick your battles. Because if Google decides, well, 80% of people are actually searching for this. So an example is a really nice example. It used to be, I hope it still is, is searching for things like Blender, blenders, and blended, which all sound really similar, but one is a piece of software that always ranks top. The other is a kitchen utensil and the other is a film. And if you were thinking in the world of blenders, they all sound the same keywords, but There's no point trying to rank for something where you're not the primary intent. In terms of Also Ask specifically, when you do the search and you get the tree, you can actually click on the individual nodes and it will open up what's related to that. So if you do find half the tree is not relevant, then just click into kind of the next step, if you like, and that should get you down. So if you call it the next rabbit hole. of searches there, but I would certainly just, um, be wary of what you're trying, what you're actually trying to rank for.

Yeah.

Oh wait. Yeah. It's a really good point. I encourage people not to get fixated on the one word that you think is really important. Uh, recognize a whole sort of set of words that, that your customers' audience are using.

Great. Thank you. I think this one actually follows really nicely from what you were just saying there. So someone's asked, as an SEO expert, is optimizing for keywords dead or dying? Should we focus more on the topic more than the particular keywords, in your opinion? What do you guys think about that?

What a juicy question.

Should we just both answer a yes or no?

1, 2, 3. Wait, I don't know what yes is and what no is, but I will give my answer. Hopefully I'll give it quickly. I guess I think probably because my roots were in journalism, I never did marketing or business. I fell into this world. I find it really important and always have to believe that there's this sense that exists sometimes that keywords are everything. And I'm like, there's a person behind the keyword. Keywords don't happen in abstract, right? There's a person with a need and an intent and a motivation behind that keyword. That's the bit that interests me more than the keywords themselves, to be completely honest. Yes, I would say try not to get focused on keywords, although that feels counterintuitive. And I know that it's the most tangible thing that we can latch onto as people who are trying to optimize, but I much prefer to think about, and Mark talked about some of this earlier, but mapping search behaviors to different parts of a consumer journey and thinking about the triggers that cause people to search, those kinds of things. And if you can own those areas, I think you do a better job than getting super fixated on keywords. But I don't know whether Mark will disagree or agree with that.

I don't think they're necessarily mutually exclusive to say it's either one or the other. Yes, Google has got better at not requiring you to type in the exact key phrase that is listed on a page. And yes, Google has definitely started with things like the Panda update to focus on websites that provide better content rather than just small bits that are matched to keywords. But what I would say is the keyword data provides you with valuable insight as to how, what words your consumers are using. It's again, it's very easy when you're trapped inside a business to start using the lingo internally and not realize that's what people use. And especially regionally. Okay. We've got our car rental company and we serve people in the UK and the US. Now, off the top of your head, do more people search for car hire or car rental? That might be something I would consider. My guess would be that Google will rank them the same. You'll see them mixed together. However, if say more people searched for car rental, you would stand a better chance of ranking having the exact words than not. So Google wouldn't just not rank you, but that, that extra couple of percent or however you want to do it. That, that's what optimization is. Optimization is the sum of many small things that collectively make a difference. So I think it would be naive to say you don't need to worry about it because there's other issues that can crop up such as cannibalization, which is when maybe you have 3 or 4 pages that inadvertently cover the same topic. And Google's not just going to nicely put 4 of your pages in a single search result. It's going to try and pick one. So there's definitely a consideration that still needs to go in, but I'm 100% with Sophie on, to it, it, you focus on intent and grow outwards from there. If I had to pick one or the other, it would be intent because I think keywords will happen naturally. But the, but again, I just come back to that term optimization. That's what optimization is. It's the polish on top that gets you that next ranking above someone and the traffic reward.

Great. Thanks so much, guys. I'm just going to squeeze in one last question if you don't mind. I know we're just on an hour now, but I just want to get this one in before we finish. So the final question, is it correct to say that Google Keywords Planner is giving real data when making SEO while other services make estimations or forecasts on keyword volumes?

I suppose the ultimate answer is we don't know because we're not Google. Like Google will know the answer in terms of that. Like I view it that Google, as we said, is the gatekeeper to all of this data and they surface what they want. For Google suggestions and for People Also Ask type stuff, they're surfacing that with the intent of helping users of the website get to a better search result more quickly. With the Keyword Planner, they're surfacing that data so that advertisers can make informed decisions on how much they should spend to acquire traffic via certain keywords. I guess the question— what's the phrasing— that it's real. Right. Was that the question?

Let me just go back.

It's real for you. I think the question was around whether it's real.

Yeah, is Keyword Planner giving real data?

Yeah. My answer is we don't know because we're not Google. But my watch out is always remember that the Keyword Planner data is super commercially focused. I don't think it's not real. I don't think that's perhaps the right label to give it, but it's driven by a different purpose, which is very commercial. Is what I would say.

Yeah.

I think that question as well covered the, like the third-party providers giving traffic estimates.

Yeah.

Not to mention anyone specifically, but I, to mention a group, I would say people like, say, Sistrix, SEMrush, Searchmetrics, Linkdex, people like that give traffic estimates for key phrases. Ahrefs do, I think, as well. So that data, as far as I've seen, the core The core of that volume data does still come from Google. However, and I can actually say this because I read the IPO paperwork from SEMrush, which talks about the data that they use. So that talks about they use various third parties. We just saw SparkToro do an analysis of search stuff with similar web data. So I think what's happening there is they're combining The Google search data with clickstream data they're getting, which is essentially from millions of users that opt to install various browser extensions. And they probably don't know, but they are sending off information about their browsing behavior to, which is then sold to these third-party providers. They then have their own models on click-through rate percentages. So they make an estimated guess at, okay. We think when we look at the Google volume and we look at the clickstream data volume, that the actual traffic is this. And if you're in number 2, we think you'll get this much data. So there's definitely a degree of estimation there. And I think it's as good a job as can feasibly be done. I said right at the beginning, a lot of forecasting is, you know, in part guesswork. However, just yesterday I saw a site that one of these tools said was getting 5 million visitors a month. And in December they dropped to 3 million. And luckily for me, I know the person who does the SEO at this site. So I messaged them and I was like, oh wow, what's going on here? And they said, we've, it's flat. There's no difference in, in our side and the traffic data. So I've experienced both ends where it's been creepily accurate and cases like this where it's saying there's a 2 million difference and I speak to the person and they're like, no, it's, it's They've just hit some of their metrics that make them think that, but actually the traffic's the same. So they're useful, I think, for size of prize type stuff when you're forecasting and saying, okay, we could get this much traffic, but I take all of it with a pinch of salt.

Great. Thank you so much, guys. Really appreciate you sticking around to answer that last question. I think there's a few questions that we may not have had time to get to, but you can always get in touch. with any of us on Twitter afterwards, and we'll help out where we can there. Thank you for everyone that's joined the webinar today as well. There's been absolutely loads of you. This has been one of our most popular webinars to date, so it's really great to have you all here. We do run these sessions regularly, so our next one is in April. It'll be the last week in April. We're just firming up the details for that one, but as you've all registered, you'll get a link to the invite page as soon as we've got that sorted. And if you want to have a look at any of our previous webinars, you can either go straight to our YouTube channel, which is youtube.com/AnswerThePublic, or if you go to answerthepublic.com, you can click on Learn in the top nav and go to our webinar page, and they're all hosted on there as well. So yeah, we hope to see you at our next one. Really looking forward to that. You will get a recording for this one as well. Didn't mention that, but I know Stella said that in the chat. And if you've got any feedback, please do get in touch with me. My email address is hannah@answerthepublic.com, or you can do that on Twitter, so @AnswerThePublic. So a massive thank you again to Mark and Sophie. You've been wicked guests. We've absolutely loved having you, and I know there's been some amazing feedback coming through on the chat as well. So yeah, thank you, really appreciate your time.

Thank you, really enjoyed it.

Thanks for having me.

Cool. All right, we'll chat again soon. Thank you, guys.

Thanks. Bye.

See ya. Bye. Bye.