For a while now, I’ve been disappointed with the People Also Ask (PAAs) feature in Google’s search results. My disappointment is not due to the vast amount of space they take up on the SERPs (that’s another post entirely), but more that the quality is never where I expect it to be.
Google has been running PAAs since April 2015[1] and they are a pretty big deal. MozCast is currently tracking PAAs (Related Questions) across 90% of all searches[2], which is more than any other SERP feature.
The quality issue I’m running into is that I still find several obscure PAA questions and results or content from other countries.
When I run searches that have a universal answer, such as “can you eat raw chicken?”, the answer is universally correct so there is no issue with the results. But when I run a search that should return local (UK) content, such as “car insurance”, I’m finding a heavy influence from the US — especially around YMYL queries.
I wanted to find out how much of an issue this actually is, so my team and I analyzed over 1,000 of the most-searched-for keywords in the finance industry, where we would expect UK PAA results.
Before we dig in, my fundamental question going into this research was: “Should a financial query originating in the UK, whose products are governed within UK regulations, return related questions that contain UK content?”
I believe that they should and I hope that by the end of this post, you agree, too.
Our methodology
To conduct our analysis, we followed these steps:
1. Tag keywords by category and sub-category:
2. Remove keywords where you would expect a universal result, e.g. “insurance definition”.
3. Extract PAAs and the respective ranking URLs using STAT[3]