SERP Features Course: Optimizing for People Also Ask (PAA Boxes)
Script from the lesson The SERP Features Course
Jason Barnard speaking: People Also Ask. What’s the situation? Across all its SERPs, Google is pushing People Also Ask very hard. Why is that? Well, when someone searches on Google, they’re expressing a problem for which they’re looking for a solution or a question for which they want the answer. Bear in mind that every search is explicitly or implicitly, a question or expression of a problem, even Googling your brand name.
Jason Barnard speaking: The implicit question here is ambiguous, but Google understands, where do I find and I want information about. Now, the fundamental aim of Google is to present the answer to the users’ question or the solution to their problem. The Brand SERP does this by putting your site at the top for the question where do I find and everything else for the question I want information about. Today, it’s moving towards a more proactive role presenting additional information related to the initial question.
Jason Barnard speaking: Much like other platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter, Google is increasingly keeping the user on their platform by pushing related ideas and suggestions. They’re expanding the opportunities for the user to stay on their platform.
Jason Barnard speaking: People Also Ask is one way that Google is doing this. It’s suggesting questions that are related to your brand. Now, over 30% of Brand SERPs have People Also Ask. If they don’t appear on your Brand SERP now they probably will soon. So, it’s well worthwhile being prepared by making sure you’ve got the answers to common questions about and around your business. That way, you have a great chance of occupying that space when PAA does appear.
Jason Barnard speaking: The People Also Ask Boxes on Brand SERPs can contain both questions that are specific to the brand and also questions that relate to what the brand does.
Jason Barnard speaking: Examples of the former are, “Who is WooRank?” or “Where is WooRank based?”
Jason Barnard speaking: Examples of the latter are “What is an SEO audit”, and “How can I check my website ranking?”
Jason Barnard speaking: For brand-specific questions, you really do need to provide the answer. The questions are specifically about you and they’re right there on your Brand SERP. So, you have every interest and every chance to provide the answer yourself. Much of the time, these questions are not answered by the brand themselves.
Jason Barnard speaking: They’re answered more often by third-party sites, particularly forums, articles, and informational sites like Wikipedia. None of which is controlled by the brand itself. Dominating the brand-specific questions is simple if you use the FAQ system I’ll show you in a moment. You’re the best source of information about your brand. So logically, you have the best chance of Google providing you here. For questions that aren’t brand-specific, ideally you would provide the answer in order to control your SERP, but also to keep the search of focus on your brand. Once again, these questions are rarely answered by the brands themselves.
Jason Barnard speaking: They’re commonly answered by third party sites, such as blogs, articles, informational sites like Wikipedia and worst of all competitors because the industry level questions can reasonably be answered by anyone. Dominating those questions in the PAA box is harder, but you can do it. Once again, the FAQ system in this episode can be a very good approach for any questions that have simple answers, say 300 words or less. Questions that require more involved and detailed answers will require a really well SEO article.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, why is it so important to control the People Also Ask questions? Firstly, because you want to control the message on your Brand SERP as much as you possibly can. These PAA Boxes give multiple opportunities for you to lose that control. If you don’t provide the answers to the questions that appear in People Also Ask, you’re losing control of your message.
Jason Barnard speaking: You’re losing the thread of your own story and letting somebody else tell your story to your audience. Secondly, accuracy. The answers that appear might not be correct. That’s a pity especially if the question is about your brand or your products. Thirdly, distraction. These questions can potentially distract people and move them away from focusing on your brand.
Jason Barnard speaking: The questions could start a new train of thought and perhaps move them onto another site, possibly a direct competitor. And remember whoever the person is, this is a critical stage of their relationship with you. They’re navigating to your site or they’re researching you, and you really want to keep them 100% focused on you and the solutions you can bring them. Now, how do you get the PAA spots on your brand?
Jason Barnard speaking: For both brand-specific and more general questions, the single most important thing is to provide a clear, accurate, and well-focused answer to the specific question. Then you also need to provide the answers to those questions in a format that’s easy for Google to digest and then deliver to its users on your Brand SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking: So, you need to make a list of the specific questions that appear on your SERP and then write accurate, well-written answers and put them in an optimized FAQ section. In this course we’re focused on Brand SERPs, so the number of questions you need
Jason Barnard speaking: to answer is quite limited. However, you might want to look at building a Q&A strategy, expand this small FAQ section to cover pre and post-sale questions, both brand centric and more general.
Jason Barnard speaking: And that will bring you a big bonus. You’ll cover a wide range of highly relevant search queries that will get you visibility in Google and attract traffic. And by providing quality answers to relevant questions in a format that’s easy to deliver for Google, you’d appear in a wide variety of SERPs with a good chance of getting PAA and Featured Snippets.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, back to Brand SERPs. For getting control of your Brand SERP, you need to prioritize the questions that Google is suggesting to its users when they search your name. It doesn’t matter if you think these questions are relevant or important or not, Google thinks they are important and it’s showing them to your audience, so you really need to answer them. For brand-specific questions, remember that this is information about you, that Google is explicitly interested in. It’s vital that the information you give is accurate and ideally in your own words. For questions that are not brand-specific, you can see where you’re failing.
Jason Barnard speaking: If someone else is ranking in the context of your Brand SERP with a question that Google sees as highly relevant for your brand name, then you have a gap in your content. This is a great opportunity to fill that gap either with a full-blown article or an FAQ page if the question requires only a simple answer.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, on to how to organize your FAQ section. Firstly, the structure of it. It’s very important to keep it super logical so that Google can digest the information easily. If you intend to expand this idea and answer a lot of other questions, then make sure you divide the pages into logical categories so you have a siloed FAQ system that can expand over time.
Jason Barnard speaking: Your structure will look something like this. FAQ homepage has the list of the FAQ categories with links. Each FAQ category has a list of sub categories with links. Each sub category has a list of the questions in that category that link through to the page that contains the answer to the specific question.
Jason Barnard speaking: Importantly, don’t put the answer or even a partial answer in those category and sub category pages since Google might be tempted to rank those pages instead of the single ounce of page that provides the best user experience. You might also be tempted to use an accordion system and provide multiple questions and answers on a single page.
Jason Barnard speaking: Don’t do that. Why not? Number one, it’s rare that these rank well. Number two, they have much less chance of getting a PAA or Featured Snippet. Number three, the presentation on Google isn’t great. Number four, it’s a bad user experience when somebody comes from Google.
Jason Barnard speaking: If you’re lucky enough to rank a page like this and get a click, then this is the situation. The user asked Google a specific question. Google has recommended your answer, but when that person lands on your page, they don’t see the answer or even the question, they have to scroll through the questions, scan reading them, to find their question, then click on that to see the answer, they’re unlikely to do that, they’re much more likely to bounce. A better UX is that the user lands on a page that answers the question directly. One question and answer per page is good for Google and good for the user. So ideally on these answer pages, you’ll answer the specific question clearly and accurately, and then you can provide a list of related questions underneath with links to the pages that answer each. That’s a good user experience. It’s really great for users to have related questions underneath the initial question so that they can investigate related issues easily. It’s also great for Google since it helps with crawling and more importantly indicates which questions are related to each other, including cross-category.
Jason Barnard speaking: Breadcrumbs are really useful, so make sure you have them. They’re great for giving the user a quick visual clue about the context of the question, and also an opportunity to navigate upwards to other related questions. I mentioned that the presentation on Google isn’t great. And here’s what I mean. I kept it to last because it’s really the clincher about the one page per question and answer system.
Jason Barnard speaking: Google shows the meta title as the blue link. So each question needs its own meta title. If you have one page with multiple questions and answers, then the meta title will necessarily be vague and less than optimal. And Gary Illyes from Google confirmed that for PAA and Featured Snippets, they’re not going to show anything except the meta title as the blue link anytime soon.
Jason Barnard speaking: So, this isn’t short term. One page per question and answer is the way forward. And the last objection I hear is that people who go to the site by another route directly or through another referral, or perhaps a bookmark, won’t be able to find the answer to their question. Three things here, relatively few people will come to your FAQ and
then try to navigate to a specific question, that isn’t how most people think.
Jason Barnard speaking: If you have search functionality, they might use that, but many people instinctively search Google, and that means they’ll be better served by a one page per question system. Now for the page layout, the H1 is the question or a statement that represents the question like this. The paragraph immediately below answers the question accurately and clearly, and stays focused on the exact answer to the specific question.
Jason Barnard speaking: If the answer requires a couple of paragraph, that’s perfect. If the full answer is short, keep it short. If you waffle around the subject, Google will give the PAA spot to somebody who doesn’t. Google will show about 50 words on the SERP. So the ideal answer takes more than that, since at less than 50 words, the user will have the answer on the SERP and won’t need to click. On a Brand SERP, that might be acceptable to you. The aim was to get the place in the PAA. In other situations, you really want the clicks since getting the person to your site allows you to provide more information about your brand, your offers, and then push them towards acquisition with an upsell, and importantly any visit from a new visitor allows you to add a cookie and potentially remarket them.
Jason Barnard speaking: In the case of Brand SERPs, that’s particularly valuable. The user is a very valuable target since they just searched for you, so they’ve demonstrated an interest in working with you. Like the H1, the meta title is the question or a statement that represents the question like this. Then the meta-description is a partial answer.
Jason Barnard speaking: As I mentioned earlier, with PAA and Featured Snippets, Google most often displays the paragraph below the H1 that contains the answer. So, the meta description doesn’t offer much control, but it’s well worth adding a meta description anyway, give a partial answer with a call to action, learn more. This is going to display when the page appears in the other SERPs, perhaps as a traditional blue link.
Jason Barnard speaking: Schema markup. Adding FAQ Schema markup to your pages is a very good idea. It helps Google digest the content and provides explicit information about how the content should be presented. Both of those encourage Google to deliver your answer in a PAA or Featured Snippet rather than somebody else’s.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, there were a couple of big advantages if you’re using WordPress and Yoast. Yoast makes creating Google-friendly FAQ pages really quick and easy. Yoast offer a super optimized Gutenberg block with the correct Schema markup and Google loves these blocks, but this changes the layout of the page very slightly.
Jason Barnard speaking: The question needs to go inside the Gutenberg block, so the H1 becomes a short statement that indicates what it is we’re talking about. So in this case, the H1 is a short statement of context. Question and answer should go in the correct places in the Yoast FAQ Guttenberg block.
Jason Barnard speaking: The meta title is the question and you’ll need to update that manually since it will default to your H1, which would ruin the trick. The meta-description is a full or partial answer as I described before. Now, images. You might have noticed that an image shows in Featured Snippets. These pages can appear as Featured Snippets where images are very important.
Jason Barnard speaking: If you get a Featured Snippet with one of these pages and you don’t include an image, Google will either not show an image at all or it will show an image from another site, both of which are lost opportunities for you. Images don’t appear in the People Also Ask Box, so for your Brand SERP, they aren’t strictly necessary, but Google may well add images to PAA in the future, so be prepared.
Jason Barnard speaking: So if possible, provide a quality image to go with your answer every time. Always add it to the same block of content, preferably as an inline image in the paragraph.
Jason Barnard speaking: If you move it outside the block to make things prettier, Google won’t use your image because it’s not sure whether or not the answer and the image is belonging together. Include the image in your schema markup. That will help Google see the relationship between the answer and the image. In Yoast or WordPress, there’s an option to add an image to the FAQ Gutenberg block. Use that since it ensures the images in the same block and also adds the image to the Schema markup. It’s easy and very effective, so use it.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, add video if you can. Google is looking for more multimedia content, so video gives you a slight advantage today and will probably help enormously going forwards. And in some circumstances, Google is putting video answers right in the SERP. That’s an opportunity you’ll want to take. If you don’t, somebody else will, maybe a competitor. Now, quick hint, since you won’t get the click, make sure you’ve added some visual branding to your video.
Jason Barnard speaking: If you’re not using WordPress and Yoast, there’s a nice Yoast hack. Install a copy of WordPress on a development platform and don’t forget to make it non-indexable. Install Yoast on that. Create Yoast Gutenberg FAQ blocks and copy and paste the content block and the schema markup into your live site. You could even get your developers to create an integrator system similar to Yoast FAQ blocks into your CMS.
Jason Barnard speaking: And a quick warning, don’t oversell in the answer. Whether on your brand SERP or not, Google is looking to provide a helpful answer to a specific question to its users. So in the answer you’d give, mention your brand by all means, but don’t be too sale-centric. Heavy-handed sales pitches and informative content is not only a turnoff for Google, but also a turnoff to people.
Jason Barnard speaking: And on the Brand SERP those people are your core audience. You don’t need to oversell. On the answer page, you have an opportunity to upsell. In the sidebar or underneath the answer, you can provide more information about your brand, your offers, and a description of why the person might want to do business with you.
Now, how can you find the questions that you need to answer? If you have the People Also Ask already on your Brand SERP, you’ll see three or maybe four questions right there. Add those at the top of your list, then click on one of those PAA and another two or three may appear. If they do, then keep clicking on questions until new one stop appearing.
Jason Barnard speaking: Add all those questions to your list. If you don’t have the PAA box on your SERP, or if you want to extend your list of questions, then look at search terms around your brand and see what triggers a PAA. Every situation is unique, but here are some example of queries that often trigger People Also Ask. What is brand, what this brand do, brand info, what products this brand sell, how this brand work, brand pricing, brand features. And then, to find even more questions you can usefully answer, scroll to the bottom of the SERP and click on the Related Searches. See if they trigger a People Also Ask, add those questions to your list too. After a while, you’ll end up seeing the same questions again and again, and that’s probably a good time to stop and get to work actually answering the questions.
