The "People Also Ask" Segment of Google Searches

How To Appear In The “Other Asked Questions” Of Google

After having successfully completed a number of SEO "stunts" I decided to try to position myself in Google's PAAs. Here is the result of the test and the lessons, the first test was a failure, the second exceeded expectations. All SEO experts try hard to get advantage of this opportunity.

Google launched in November 2017 in France a new feature, PAA (People Also Ask) or Other Questions Asked. The objective for Google is to immediately provide answers to the questions most requested by Internet users by using certain sites selected by a secret algorithm. Immediately a series of articles came out on their impact for natural referencing and solutions to try to benefit from it. We had tried without results at the time, but we have just realized that after corrections we have succeeded, there is still learning in SEO! We cannot assure you that the recipe is the right one, because of course we don't know the algorithm, but we do know what we did to make it happen.

What Are Paas

These are answers offered at the top of the Google page to questions asked in the form of an accordion, as soon as you click on one of the boxes you see two others appear, and so on.

Impact for SEO Experts

Of course this functionality has a negative impact on classic organic SEO:

- Positions 1, 2, 3 and the others are lowered down

- The number of clicks will decrease

- The CTR (Click Through Rate) or click rate will decrease

In short, it is no longer sufficient to trump the first places or featured snippets to obtain visits, it is also necessary to try to penetrate the understanding of PAAs and to position oneself in this key functionality.

The Test

I had already managed to make triplets by simultaneously positioning on the same page 3 snippet:

- Adwords ad. Not difficult, just pay the right amount in the right place to be in the lead.

- Position 1, which requires background SEO work

- The featured Snippet which is also called position 0

So I decided to try to find myself in this still quite mysterious PAA functionality. But the most complicated is that each snippet or functionality of Google responds to different algorithms whose logic must be tried to understand.

The first tests were a failure as I had described it in an article of February 3, 2020 published on our blog, here are the reasons I thought:

- SEO title different from H1

- Error understanding the type of algorithm, I thought it was close to the featured snippet, this is not the case

- Waiting time of one month which was probably not enough.

So I had made corrections before forgetting the corrected article. By analyzing the page that brought me the most visits in the search console, I just came to understand that the test had ended up succeeding, better still, at the time of the screenshot we accumulate the first position of the PAA with first of organic referencing, full box on a difficult "how to sell" request. The result therefore exceeds expectations, but in terms of SEO the results are short-lived and the satisfactions short-lived!

As we are in SEO, it is of course necessary to be careful, everything changes all the time, and the tests are empirical, nevertheless here are some observations:

- Try the experience in a semantic cocoon in which one is recognized

- Identical H1 title and SEO title

- Ask a question followed by a verb

- Short, simple answers, for the general public, not for experts

- 6 to 12 responses positioned in the form of "bullet points".

- And finally, wait a few months, at least for us.

Kam