What are the best Questions Being Asked research tools?

[kcook73]

In addition to the usual keyword research I want to do some more research into the main questions people are asking about a topic. I also want to understand how many people are asking these questions. I've looked at Quora and Replyz - they are ok but don't answer 'how many people are asking' with any insight data - are there any other tools you think would help or you would recommend?

[Chris.Menke]

I'm not aware of a tool such as that but you could search google for your question (or parts of your question) in quotation marks and to get an idea.  You can even do a site:domain search and include a quotationed portion of the question you're looking for--such as:

site:quora.com "search for questions"  or  site:replyz.com " climb mount everest?"

In the results, you'll see that google gives you the number of results that it has for that search.  While that number won't be exact, by any means, it should provide you with some relative insight .

[grasshopper]

Agreed, using a site: operator, and then the exact phrase(s) that you want to know about is a good proxy for aggregate activity around that topic within each Q&A community.

Kathy, I think the larger question for you is what communities you should be looking at.  Yahoo Answers is going to give you very different results from StackOverflow, as you know.

The keyword research you're doing can serve as a good proxy for how many people are looking into a topic, but the individual community analysis will provide you with qualitative data about the demographics and psychographics of your audience, and the best kinds of products and content that will serve them.

[Chris.Menke]

Yep.  Use of  a quotation-marked portion of your questions (in different variations) without the site: operator will provide a list of sites/communities where the questions are being asked and then you can dig deeper into those communities using the site: operator.