Meet James
I’m James Oliver, I have around 10 years of experience in SEO and affiliate marketing, and I am one of the owners of Answer Socrates, a free keyword research and keyword clustering tool.
I also own Oliver.com, which is my personal brand website where I talk about SEO, affiliate marketing, parasite SEO, and more.
I also run other SEO tools like SEOTalos.com which is for deeper insights based on your Google Search Console data, and ParasiteSEO.com, which is a parasite SEO SaaS tool.
What inspired you to acquire Answer Socrates?
I used it a lot when I started in SEO, and Answer Socrates was always one of the best free SEO tools.
Then, unfortunately it went down as the original creators weren’t working on it, but I knew it was so loved by hundreds of thousands of SEOs, that we had to bring it back.
Now, we’ve built Answer Socrates so it is the most generous free plan of any keyword research tool, and you get more free keyword clustering credits than any tool offers.
Who is your ideal user – bloggers, agencies, or enterprises?
Our customers have all types of sites: many use it for local SEO keyword research, some use it for e-commerce content planning, and businesses of all types use it for their content.
One of the best things about Answer Socrates is how versatile it is, because it generates so many potential keywords for you.
This makes it useful for almost any type of business that wants to find keywords for their SEO strategy.
How does Answer Socrates find question keywords that other tools miss?
We have a tool called the Recursive Keyword tool, which finds not only your initial keywords, but then finds what people are searching for AFTER they type the initial keyword.
This finds keywords that other keywords aren’t searching for, on great topics you might not have otherwise considered.
It’s included in our free plan, and is a very powerful free keyword research tool.
How do you balance simplicity for beginners and depth for advanced SEOs?
We try to make the UX as simple as possible to help people use it easily.
The keyword generation just involves entering a keyword, and then we find all the questions for you.
Then, you have the option to download the CSV, or cluster your keywords, or look into the search volume data. It’s simple, but I don’t think this restricts advanced SEOs either.
How do you see keyword research evolving with AI-driven search like ChatGPT?
Topical authority is very important for ChatGPT. Recent findings found ChatGPT uses RRF (reciprocal rank fusion) in search, and you can rank higher in ChatGPT by having many posts that come up lower in search, than if you have just one post ranking top.
Answer Socrates helps a lot with this: by finding all the similar topics that are related to the keyword, that tools like ChatGPT or Gemini might search.
How does Answer Socrates compete with tools like AnswerThePublic, SEMrush, or Ahrefs?
Firstly, we have the most generous free plan. You can potentially find thousands of keywords with Answer Socrates on the free plan.
We’re also focused on finding keywords that these tools don’t find, so you can build an SEO content strategy around the real questions people are asking – and not the same keywords that everyone else is finding from Ahrefs or Semrush.
What’s next on your roadmap for Answer Socrates?
We’re doing more with People Also Asked, so that we become a no-brainer free alternative to tools like AlsoAsked and KeywordsPeopleUse.
We’re also further improving the clustering, and adding more sources of keyword discovery, like Quora, Reddit, and other topics.
We want to go beyond traditional Google SEO keyword research, and become the ultimate topic discovery platform, for AI search, as well as for social media content strategies.
What advice would you give to entrepreneurs looking to enter the SaaS space?
Give it a try! But also don’t just give up in a few months if it doesn’t work. It took a year to get Answer Socrates where it is now, and for a long time it was tough work.
Did you enjoy our interview? Do you have anything to say to our community?
I enjoyed it, thank you for having me!
If you want to use Answer Socrates, you can sign up for free. And, we’ll give you some free resources like our keyword research guide when you sign up via our email newsletter.
