It's undeniable that the SERPs have changed considerably in the last year or so. Elements like featured snippets, Knowledge Graphs, local packs, and People Also Ask have really taken over the SEO world — and left some of us a bit confused.
In particular, the People Also Ask (PAA) feature caught my attention in the last few months. For many of the clients I've worked with, PAAs have really had an impact on their SERPs.
If you are anything like me, you might be asking yourself the same questions:
- How important are these SERP features?
- How many clicks do they “steal” from SEO?
- And most importantly: who are these people that also ask SO MANY questions? Somehow, I always imagine the hipster-looking man from Answer the Public[1] being the leader of such a group of people...
The first part of the post focuses on five things I've learned about People Also Ask, while the second part outlines some ideas on how to take advantage of such features.
Let’s get started! Here are five things you should know about PAAs.
1. PAA can occupy different positions on the SERP
I don’t know about you all, but I wasn't fully aware of the above until a few months ago; I just assumed that most of the time PAAs appeared in the same location, IF and only IF it was actually triggered by Google. I didn't really pay attention to this featured until I started digging into it.
Distinct from featured snippets (which appear always at the top of the SERP), PAAs can be located in several different parts of the page.
Let’s look at some examples:
Keyword example: [dj software]
For the keyword [dj