How To Use ‘People Also Ask’ (PAA) For Better SEO

‘People Also Ask’ (PAA) is a Google SERP feature that shows searchers questions related to their search query.

It's a valuable source of topics and subtopics that you can use to expand your blog post. You can also use it to find LSI keywords related to the topic of your main keyword.

This article gives you 5 important facts about PAA that you can use to improve your SEO.

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As you click on a question in one PAA box, another PAA box appears with a different set of questions.

Here's a progression through 10 PAA boxes:

In this ‘People Also Ask’ journey, we’ve gone from the original query ‘what is a featured snippet?’ to a totally new topic: ‘what are the 5 basic reading skills’.

This illustrates an important aspect of PAA boxes: when the initial search query doesn’t produce exactly what the searcher was looking for, the PAA questions help the searcher narrow down the search. 

It does this by offering three or four slightly different questions with each new PAA box.

Other observed PAA behaviors

Here are some other PAA behaviors that people have noticed:

Understanding searcher intent

PAA boxes are a window into understanding searcher intent for any given keyword. 

Remember that the questions in PAA boxes are actual questions that people are typing into Google. So dig around in the PAA boxes that appear for your keywords.

You’ll begin to see patterns in the questions that people ask. Those patterns reveal the main searcher intent behind those keyword phrases.

Here’s an example. 

Let’s say you’re writing an article about long tail keywords. Type ‘what are long tail keywords’ into Google and look at the PAA box:

There are three searcher intent clues in this PAA box:

These are angles or subtopics that you can work into your article so that it better addresses the search query.

Expand your content

Using PAA boxes to expand your content is closely related to the last point but instead of drilling down into the core issue behind the search query, you’ll be using PAA questions to throw a wider net.

The idea behind PAA boxes is that each PAA question offers a slightly different slant on the original query that you typed into Google. 

This means that you can use PAA questions to broaden the content of your web page and identify topics and subtopics that you may have overlooked.

The very fact that these ‘shoulder’ topics are showing up in PAA boxes means that the Google algorithm is aware of them and knows that they are related to your main keyword.

And that means that when you add those topics and subtopics to your web page content, you’ll be boosting the topical authority of that web page. 

And that’s going to help your page rank higher in the search results.

Here’s an example.

Let’s say you’re writing an article on the topic ‘how to sharpen a lawn mower’. Type that query into Google and then look at the PAA box. 

The first PAA question looks like a good topic to add to your article:

Clicking on that first PAA question produces a new PAA box with two more subtopics you could use in your article:

Clicking on the second PAA question produces another subtopic for your article:

Clicking on the third item in the original PAA box gives you one more topic for your article:

And clicking on the fourth PAA questions gives you two more subtopics:

Add those subtopics as headings in your article and then write 200 to 300 words on each of those questions.

By doing that you'll dramatically increase the topical authority of your article. And that's going to make your article rank higher in the search results. Because topical authority is an important ranking factor.

But not only that: by adding those six or seven extra sections to your article, you've just added another 1200 words to your blog post. And that's another feather in your hat for ranking high in the search results.

As we’ve seen above, if you keep progressing through the PAA boxes, you eventually move to a completely new topic. 

So when using this technique, be careful not to move too far away from the original topic - there will come a point where the PAA questions are so far removed from the original query that they deserve a new article on their own.

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