The SEO edge hiding in plain sight
Google handles roughly 3.5 billion searches every day, and 16-20% of them have never been typed before. Marketers often treat those queries as noise. They are not. They are live demand signals: buyers telling you exactly what they want, before a competitor writes the answer.
That is the argument behind search listening, and AnswerThePublic makes it practical. Instead of brainstorming keywords from a conference room, you pull the actual questions people type around a product or topic.
Inside an AnswerThePublic search
Run a term like “best earbuds” and the tool returns a search landscape. Neil Patel’s example produced 370 results, organised into five sections.
- Questions — what, how, can, when, who, why, which, will, where, are
- Prepositions — for, can, with, without, near, to, is
- Comparisons — versus/vs, and, like, or
- Alphabetical — useful for quick ROI picks
- Related — conversion-ready long-tail ideas
The useful discipline is not to chase all 370. Pick the clusters your team can actually execute, save the rest for later, and let the data direction guide the content.
Where the demand hides: comparisons and questions
Comparison queries are often the most under-served. The source gives the example of “best earbuds that match my skin tone.” Beats by Dre jumped on exactly that with a Kim Kardashian collaboration, and the combination of product fit and celebrity fashion made the brand stand out in the headphones market.
That is the framework: find a question no one has answered for your market, then answer it with content that positions your product.
Pair AnswerThePublic with Ubersuggest
Raw question data becomes more useful when you add search demand and content performance. Plug the same keyword into Ubersuggest, open Keywords, then Content Ideas. The combination shows two things: the price point or angle your audience cares about, and which brand comparison is already winning.
From there, turn a cluster of questions into an ownable piece. Patel’s example: “What Are the Top Best Earbuds Right Now Under $100?” It works because the audience created the question; you are just the brand confident enough to answer it. If you produce it as a YouTube video, you can chop the footage into short clips for social and get multiple assets from one brief.
The search listening loop
Do not use these tools for a one-off brainstorm. Run the loop every quarter:
- Pull queries from AnswerThePublic.
- Cluster them by intent and angle.
- Validate demand with Ubersuggest.
- Publish the answer, then schedule the next cluster.
This keeps your content pipeline tied to what buyers actually ask, not what internal stakeholders think sounds clever.
Source: Neil Patel
