Is It Worth Targeting The ‘People Also Ask’ Box With Your SEO? | Pennink Productions

by Liz Seyi Digital marketing manager

The chances are that if you’ve been drawn to click on this blog post by our chosen title, you’ll either know exactly what we’re talking about, or you won’t have a clue. So, let’s give you a quick introduction or refresher.

We are – of course – referring to the question boxes that have become increasingly prominent on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) in recent years.

Many questions have been asked by brands and experts alike, about the role and importance these intriguing boxes could have for search engine optimisation (SEO). What, then, do you need to know about them when promoting your brand online?

Introducing ‘People also ask’ boxes

The idea of the ‘People also ask’ box – which we’ll call the PAA box for shortness – is ostensibly to help human searchers further explore a given topic they’ve already performed a search for, and to answer some of the specific related questions they might have.

At the time of typing, for example, we can perform a Google search for “buying property in London”, and among the organic search results, we see a PAA box presenting such further queries as “Is buying property in London a good investment?” and “Can foreigners buy property in London?”

There is a dropdown arrow next to each of these questions, and when that arrow is clicked, a preview is provided of a page that seeks to answer the particular query. This single click may also add even more questions to the list.

There’s a lot that even the most knowledgeable SEO marketing experts are still learning about PAA boxes. And with recent data suggesting that these boxes are coming to be more frequently used, it seems that we’ll be continuing to find out more about them for a while to come.

The role that ‘People also ask’ has in optimising for search engines

Even if you don’t go as far as trying to target your brand’s website being featured in a PAA box, these boxes can still be fascinating from an SEO perspective. After all, the mere questions that Google chooses to provide in such boxes gives you a clue about user intent.

As for if you do succeed in getting a page of your site to be previewed within a PAA box, this could help to present your brand as an authority on the subject in question.

In short, PAA boxes could help your organisation a lot with its search engine marketing efforts. And if you do choose to optimise for these boxes, you could start by doing something as simple as picking out a PAA question that seems relevant to your own brand, and answering it in your online content.

There is, however, a lot more to effective optimisation for PAA boxes than this. Your brand might use keyword analysis tools away from Google, for instance, to generate questions that it could base future content around. Or you might even just look back at existing content your brand has produced in months and years past, and consider how it can be tweaked to better answer whatever questions the target reader is likely to have.

Much of the work that you do to optimise for PAA boxes – even if you don’t manage to ‘win’ a single query within such a box – could also help strengthen your brand’s all-round presence in the search rankings. By this, we mean that optimising your content around relevant keywords and topics will likely benefit your organisation’s online visibility far beyond just PAA boxes.

Would you like to talk to the PENNInk Productions team in greater detail about the strategies and solutions that could help you get the best out of your brand’s web presence? If so, don’t wait any longer to enquire of our website design, branding, graphics and SEO marketing experts.