Savvy content creators know that Answer the Public, a visual search engine, is an awesome place to go for keyword inspiration. But how can you transform its gigantic spider diagram into an interactive tool for creating relevant, engaging content? I’ve discovered the answer in MindManager 2020’s powerful new Excel Data Mapper tool.
Answer the Public analyzes public search engine traffic patterns and displays a broad selection of terms that people are using to find what they need, in an engaging visual formt. What’s fascinating about it is that it displays the results in multiple contexts, such as search terms that are:
- Questions
- Propositions
- Comparisons
- Loosely related to the concept
For content creators, Answer the Public is like finding the cave of riches in the story Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves. These aren’t just random phrases. They’re terms that real people are using to conduct real searches. That makes it a powerful resource for anyone who seeks to write online content that will rank well in search engines.
While playing around with Answer the Public one day, I asked myself, “I wonder if I can export the results of a search?” Much to my delight, I discovered that it offers a comma-separated variable (CSV) export tool. From there, it was a short leap to pondering, “I wonder what would happen if I fed a CSV file from Answer the Public into MindManager 2020, using its new Excel Data Mapper tool?”
This tool enables you to quickly and easily import data from an Excel spreadsheet into the flexible, dynamic environment of a MindManager map. The Data Mapper gives you precise control over what information you’re importing from your spreadsheet, and how it’s going to be structured in your map. You can select the range and data you want to include, and exactly how you want the rows and columns to display.
The results of this little experiment can be seen below (click to view interactive version):
As you can see, it worked wonderfully well. “So what?” you may be saying. “You now have a mind map with HUNDREDS of topics? How is that useful?”
Once you have all of this data in a flexible, visual form, you can actually do a LOT with it.
For example, you can:
- Create one or more new first-level topics as “containers” to begin sorting the search terms that have the greatest value to you. Eventually, you can delete the rest.
- Use MindManager’s icons to rank and visually prioritize the most promising phrases in your mind map.
- Add subtopics or topic notes to search terms, capturing your thoughts on any ideas you generate that are related to them. In this sense, your mind map serves as a giant content brainstorming tool.
- Create a hypertext link from a search term to the Google search results page for it. This will help you get a sense for what others have written about this topic, so you can differentiate your content.
- Use MindManager’s properties tool to create custom fields to capture metadata about each key search term, such as the number of searches Google displays and how competitive that term is (based on keyword research tools like WordTracker and BuzzSumo).
In other words, you can build an entire visual database of potential content topics from one simple Answer the Public search.
Why not give it a try?
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