Grow With Owwtreach - The weekly digital marketing shortcut for local businesses.
Google’s ‘People Also Ask’ and ‘Autocomplete’ features are the closest thing you’ll get to peeking into your client’s minds and seeing what they are thinking about the services you provide.
If you type a question into Google and look past the top few results. A box unfolds with more questions, related to the one you just asked. Click one and it expands to show an answer, and the list below it refreshes with more questions to click.
That's the People Also Ask feature.
And it’s a goldmine for understanding what your clients actually want. It tells you exactly what they are looking for - in their own words.
Few businesses stop to notice that Google just handed them a written transcript of exactly what a customer asks before they buy.
We touched on questions back in Issue 9, when we talked about answering the questions your clients ask AI tools.
People Also Ask runs on the same underlying principle but comes from a different source: Google's own record of what real searchers type, in the order they type it.
Every question in that chain is content that should be answered on your website.
Do that and you're a candidate to be pulled into that same box, sitting on the results page before anyone reaches the ten blue links below it.
There's a second version of this that searchers see before they even hit enter.
Start typing that same search and Google predicts the ending before you finish the sentence. That's Autocomplete, and it's not guessing. Every prediction is ranked by how often real people actually search that exact phrase.
Where People Also Ask shows you the chain of questions after a search, Autocomplete shows you the precise wording people use most.
A plumber typing "How much does it cost to replace a water heater…?" will see Google finish the sentence with the exact phrasing customers use most in that search. That's free, real-time evidence of the words to put on the page.
One Practical Move
Open a private browsing window. That matters here: Autocomplete personalises based on your own search history, so a normal window shows you your own patterns, not your customers'.
Type your service and your town into the search bar, one letter at a time, and stop before you hit enter. Write down every prediction Google offers.
Then run the full search and open the People Also Ask box. Click through eight to ten questions and write those down too.
You'll end up with two lists: the exact phrases customers already search, and the questions they ask right after. Between them, that's your next month of content.
One Practical Move
AlsoAsked.com maps the full People Also Ask tree on one screen: every branch, every follow-up question, without the clicking. It’s free for a handful of searches a month, which is plenty to start.
Bonus Move
Autocomplete needs no tool at all. It's sitting in the search bar every time you open it.
Keep howwling!
Fungai,
Your Owwtreach Guy
Grow with Owwtreach
www.owwtreach.com