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Search tips from friends and partners are the best tips. Here are three they’ve sent me in the past couple of weeks that I want to share with you.

AnswerThePublic

My partner Corey Walker at The Marketing Specialist tipped me off to the AnswerThePublic, a website that lets you search for terms that people are talking about. This is especially useful when you want to find popular topics for a blog post so search engines can find the post more easily.

The results appear in a graphic that visualizes link relationships as you can see in the graphic below. You can also change the visualization to text easily. AnswerThePublic also gives you reports based on certain criteria, such as the search term with different prepositions added.

Answer the Public sample result

The problem with AnswerThePublic is that you only get a few free searches per day based on the site’s traffic. (When you can’t search for something, wait a while.)  If you want to search with no interruptions, you can pay $99 per month or pay $948 for one year.

How Google Search Works

A similar website is Google Trends, which shows how popular your search terms are in Google. My colleague Sean Atkinson at Majority Media shared a link to How Google Search Works, a website that shows you how Google Search works. If you want to learn how to build your website to make it more search-friendly, or you’re just curious, check out this website.

Social Fonts

Through different friends, I found Alexa Heinrich, a social media manager in central Florida. Last week, her latest article on Medium pointed out a search issue with social media and fonts. A lot of people want to use different fonts to show they’re cool. But if you want people to search for your posts, Alexa shows how this doesn’t work rather effectively.

What Friends Are For

You may not have noticed the changes I made to the website this month. I changed a lot of text. I added and changed a couple of buttons. And I changed the text and buttons in the bottom section of the home page. But I didn’t do enough. Tony, who is a good friend of mine, sent me e-mail last week and said he and his friend Elaine looked at my website.

They saw a couple of problems, including clashing colors between a text link color and a button color as well as a broken link. I tweaked the button color and fixed the link. I thought I fixed those, but I didn’t, obviously.

My friend’s input led me to check my website with my trusted tool Xenu’s Link Sleuth, and Xenu’s report told me that I need to update my 2019 adventures article for late 2021. You’ll see that next article next week.

By the way, you may have also seen a new testimonial from our longtime clients at The John Stewart Company, which is a property management company in Sacramento. I finished the Mirasol Village website earlier this month. This high-profile property development is in the Sacramento River District and will open in spring 2022.

Yes, search tips from friends are the best tips not just because they want to get after you about mistakes you made, but also because they want you to have the best stuff. Thanks, Corey and Sean. And thanks, Tony and Elaine.

Eric Butow is the owner of Butow Communications Group (BCG). Eric can help you tailor your company’s digital marketing. Set up a meeting with BCG!