How to Identify Questions & Optimize Your Site for Q&A, FAQ & More


Identifying and answering searchers’ questions should be a key component of any SEO strategy. Learn key tactics and tools to help you do it the right way.

Identifying and answering searchers’ questions should be a key component of any SEO strategy.

After all, using our sites to answer questions is at the very heart of what it means to do SEO.

However, the methods and tools used to implement an effective, optimized Q&A strategy have evolved over the years.

What Are the Benefits of Optimizing for Questions & Answers?

Executing a strategy to identify and answer common questions surrounding your targeted keywords can provide a variety of tangible benefits for your SEO campaign, including:

  • Improving organic rankings by better meeting user intent on the page and providing needed context.
  • Showing search engines your depth of expertise on a given topic.
  • Earning Featured Snippets, People Also Ask, and other “fraggles” within Google’s search results.
  • Earning Rich Results by leveraging structured data.
  • Providing opportunities to increase UGC (user-generated content) throughout your site.
  • Improving your local SEO company within Google My Business.
  • Increase your potential for Scroll to Text highlighting.
  • Most importantly, effective use of Q&A can improve the user’s experience on your site and, in turn, improve your conversion rates.

How to Find the Questions Your Searchers Are Asking: 20+ Tools to Use

There are dozens of strategies that can be used to identify relevant questions related to your targeted keywords, and none of these strategies is inherently better than the other.

That said, SEO tools have innovated quite a bit in this area in the past couple of years, so if you are able to put some budget toward SEO software that provides data related to searchers’ questions, this is likely a good investment for your SEO and content strategies.

Free Question Research Tactics & Software

Google Search Console (Plus Google Sheets or Excel)

Google Search Console is a great place to harvest the questions your searchers are asking (well, limited to the ones for which your site is already receiving impressions and traffic).

For a manual approach to locating questions within the GSC interface, view your search queries from any date range and filter by question words such as “who,” “what,” or “when.”

This is a tedious process, but it allows you to stay within Google Search Console without needing to export anything.

There have been some murmurs about Google Search Console potentially accepting regular expressions (regex) in the updated Performance Report, but this hasn’t been entirely confirmed.

If and when regex is rolled out for Google Search Console, it will speed up the process of filtering your queries by various question keywords simultaneously.

Until that happens, you can export your queries and use Google Sheets or Excel to filter through them to locate questions at scale.

For even more data, you can use a Google Sheets add-on such as Search Analytics for Sheets, which allows you to import over 1,000 rows from GSC into Google Sheets (normally Google’s exports are limited to 1,000 rows).

You can then use the below Excel/Google Sheets formula to locate question keywords across a large batch of terms.

Or, you can visit our Google Sheets Template (click “Make a Copy”) to paste in your queries, impressions, and clicks from Google Search Console, and quickly identify what, if any, question keyword is contained in the query.

This is certainly true for Google’s own built-in question engine: the People Also Ask box.

People Also Ask is an interactive widget that appears in Google’s Search Results and allows users to scroll through related questions (in fact – the questions appear to load infinitely as long as the user keeps clicking on them).

According to Mordy Oberstein, CMO of RankRanger, “PAAs” have grown in visibility by 85% on desktop and mobile search results in the past 2 years, so there is no shortage of question research to be done here.

That said, SEO expert Mark Williams-Cook did a huge service to the SEO community by automating this process with his fantastic tool, AlsoAsked.com, and allowing its free use.

Below is an example of how the tool looks for one of my favorite queries, “techno in Berlin.”

All of the questions represented here are pulled directly from Google’s search results themselves and represent opportunities to add additional questions to your content and/or new pages to address searchers’ common questions.

People Also Ask is just one of a variety of features built into Google’s search results that anticipates and suggests related questions searchers might be asking about the specified query.

Google has also been testing what I informally call “query refinement bubbles,” which serve as a great opportunity to piece together relevant questions directly in the search results and without using any paid software.

Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/optimize-questions-answers-faq-more/378551/

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