How To Find Out What Your Clients Are Searching For On Google
The legal, and non-creepy way, I hasten to add. Trust me.
You’d be forgiven for reading this headline with a jauntily raised eyebrow - I can picture you now, adjusting your bi-focal ‘scepticles’ as you read on. But please, bear with me.
(Although, for the fact you’re actually reading this now, kind of proves the concept of this very article. I shall explain.)
Whether you’re a journalist, podcaster, blogger, article writer, or anything else that involves an element of writing to an audience whose attention you’re trying to capture, the headline is arguably one of the most important elements in the entire piece. So much so that in the journalism world, more often than not, the person writing the article won’t actually write the headline - that’ll be done by an editor.
Surprised? I was too when I first heard about it; I had for so long just assumed that the journalist writes the whole thing, from top to bottom. Literally.
But the reasoning is sound, when you think about it.
Headline writing is quite the art form in its own right; it takes skill to be able to drill down to the essence of an article, to give a flavour as to what’s contained within, without giving too much away before the ‘main course’, as it were.
With print media, i.e. newspapers, there’s a further pragmatic point to consider as well. Available space. If a journalist has written say a 2000 word article, the editors and page designers will need to work out where it’s to be placed within the paper, how many columns it’ll require, and how much available width there is above in order to fit in the headline.
So if a journalist has written their own, lengthy headline, there’s a chance it might be too wordy for the available space; so an editor may need to condense the headline further for it to fit, or re-write it entirely. Whilst keeping in mind of course that it has to be enticing and closely tied to the article’s theme, without it crossing the line of becoming misleading or clickbait-y. (Especially problematic in online publications).
Except, we’re not all journalists with editors
Whilst the above may be true for traditional print media, the same usually isn’t the case for the rest of us; the bloggers, business article writers, podcasters etc. We don’t always have teams of people who can collaborate on articles to get the headlines spot on - the person that writes the thing, ‘headlines’ the thing.
So it becomes even more important to get it right.
The time when clickbait entered the chat
One of the biggest banes in writing since the dawn of the world wide web has been, so-named, clickbait. As the web has evolved, so has the grab for audience attention. In an absolute vast ocean of blogs and websites, there's the ever-long struggle as to how to get eyeballs on our content, and ideally not our competitors! (When talking about business blogs for instance).
For so, soooo many years, people went more and more clickbait-y with their article headlines, in order to grab people’s attention with something outrageous, intriguing, shocking, and more often than not, downright unbelievable to the point of black comedy. (With the extremes being when the articles themselves have sod all to do with the headline!) It feels like it all went totally unchecked for a long time.
The early years of the web did feel like a bit of a digital Wild West, so I guess in some ways, there were no rules, no sheriffs, and zero accountability.
Indeed, this was at a point in the web’s adolescence where it was basically one big shop window, with no interaction - just bland corporate looking websites - a ‘look, but don’t touch’ world.
Then ‘Web 2.0’ came along, the age of user-generated content - a ‘participatory’ web, where interaction started to happen, forums, comment sections, message boards and ‘IM’ services, rudimentary (by today’s standards) social networks - until we get to where we are now with a downright cornucopia of communication platforms and social media to become all-too consumed by.
So because no one back then could really interact with anything and point out the wrongdoings and digital junk, I guess that’s why it went so un-marshalled.
But now, in 2022, we have self-appointed internet police who will gleefully call out all manner of stuff at the drop of a publish button, all set to ambush and ‘cancel’ without warning!
Because naturally, everyone is ‘right’ on the internet…..
[cue rolling eyes emoji]
Without doubt, it’s a double-edged sword if ever I saw one.
You can just imagine….
- “Hello, City of Troy reception?”
- “Mornin’ guv, we have this giant horse for you…”
- “Oh how delightful, yes certainly, I’ll sign for it”.
Anyway, I digress.
As things stand, in 2022, it is estimated that there are over 600 million blogs in existence today, out of over 1.9 billion websites. (Stats taken from Growth Badger’s website). Therefore, it’s only ever going to continue getting harder to obtain your share of the available audience. So we need to think smarter about it, to do everything we can to get eyeballs on our content, without resorting to cheap tactics like clickbait.
“There’s zero point in creating the appearance of scandal and outrageousness if your article is about this season’s best seedlings to plant.”
(I know this whole section has been a bit doom and gloom, but fear not, we’re seconds away from more positive stuff!)
So what can we mere mortals do about it?
Well, we need to get into our ideal clients’ heads. We want to design and create content around what they may be searching for, and have that information laid out clearly for them. We want it to appear nicely in front of their gleaming faces, ideally on the first couple of pages on Google.
I’m sure you’ll be familiar with the concept that when researching the best sorts of headlines to use, some of the most popular ones always come back as ‘how to….’ ones, or ‘the top 10 reasons why….’ type. Because those are what people search for - if they have a question, people will search for it like that. What we need to do is provide those answers in articles tailor made to people’s searches.
I’d like to introduce you to an online tool that you might not have come across before.
AnswerThePublic.com (direct link via the button below)
Answer The Public (ATP) is a website that analyses various google searches around 1 or 2 key words, and displays all the various things that people have actually searched for, broken down into the all important ‘who, how, when, what, where, will, are, which, can, why’ question formats.
Let’s imagine you’re a landscape gardener, and you’re about to write an article about planting trees, and your company has a strong ethos about being climate friendly - naturally you pride yourself on giving people useful information that will help the cause.
I typed in ‘planting trees’ into the search, and ATP offers up (at time of writing) 79 questions that people are searching for, based on that criteria. I say at time of writing, because this isn’t a passive website that throws up the same content again and again, it constantly analyses google searches in real time, so results will always vary depending on what is trending at that given time.
So how would we use this tool proactively?
Essentially, ATP can help you in judging how best to go about writing your article, and also offer up potential headlines you can use for it, based on the fact that people are actively searching for these very answers.
If your article takes one of the questions it offers - one of which is, for instance, “can planting trees reduce climate change?” - you can write an article/blog/record a podcast/tweet etc about just that topic.
So your article, is directly answering a live question that people are searching for. So there’s no longer the need to just pluck industry-specific topics and headlines from thin air in the hope they stick and gain some traction; you can tailor make your blog/website/social feed etc to answer the questions that people have, while building up your authority in the subject at the same time.
It gives a good insight into how best to plan your content, based on real world Google search data, so hopefully it’ll help you customise and fine tune your future marketing output to be more effective, and hopefully reach even more eyeballs.
One big caveat though. Answer The Public isn’t an uber-cheap tool, it does have a monthly or annual subscription - however, they do let you perform a couple of searches per day for free.
So, if you don’t want to pay, just bookmark the website and do a search or two per day in the lead up to creating your next piece. You’ll be able to make use of the latest real-time search data to help you produce something that’s creative, useful, timely, and solves a problem your clients have - so you & your business can provide the answers. Ideal.
All without being clickbait-y! Result!
Until next time….