People Also Ask & the content Google prefers

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERB's Up podcast, where you get some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the super quality, the super relevant, the super always curious and questioning, the one and only head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

People always ask me things...

Mordy Oberstein:

People always do ask you.

Crystal Carter:

... about this podcast. It's true. It's true.

Mordy Oberstein:

What's funny though-

Crystal Carter:

What a fantastic introduction.

Mordy Oberstein:

... is that when you give an answer, you expand, drop down to-

Crystal Carter:

And just ask more questions.

Mordy Oberstein:

And more questions load. It's so dynamic.

Crystal Carter:

Everyone loves when you ask a question and people just give you more questions back. That's always something that-

Mordy Oberstein:

I always answering a question with a question like, "How are you doing Mordy?" "How should I be doing?"

Crystal Carter:

What do you think? I'm not sure anymore.

Mordy Oberstein:

What's it to you?

Crystal Carter:

Wouldn't you like to know? These are things that we would all like to know.

Mordy Oberstein:

Music.

Crystal Carter:

And this is why we're here.

Mordy Oberstein:

Why we're here is the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can not only subscribe to a SEO newsletter, Searchlight, which comes out each and every month over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also set up your pages to answer questions, user questions, write on the SERP by adding FAQ structured data markup. Leverage the power of structured data markup with our structured data markup automation, which can save you hours of work, plus all the customization that comes along with it.

So create and customize whatever you want and benefit from the automated markup we create for you. It's Wix, where we got your back on structured data markup.

Now speaking of answering user questions, nothing speaks to this than the SERP and nothing speaks to that on the SERP more than People Also Ask, which is why today we're talking about quality content and its relationship to Google's People Also Ask box. When they say good things come in threes, they weren't looking at the SERP where good things come in fours usually.

Today we're talking about the four questions. No, not those four questions. The four questions that often show up on the SERP under the label People Also Ask, as we take a deep dive into how content quality might be influencing the People Also Ask appearance with none other than the founder of Also Ask, the best tool for extracting People Also Ask insights for keyword research, and who also happens to be the founder of Candor, an SEO agency out of the UK.

Mark Williams-Cook himself joins the podcast in just a few minutes. We'll also get into what content marketing extraordinaire Kaleigh Moore has to say about how you can write quality answers to those most pressing user questions. And of course we have the snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness.

So when it comes to the People Also Ask questions, riddle me this, riddle me that. How do I get myself some of that? As episode number 52 of SERP's Up podcast works to solve the puzzle that is People Also Ask policemen.

Crystal Carter:

That is a stonker.

Mordy Oberstein:

That was a lot. That was a lot.

Crystal Carter:

That's a lot.

Mordy Oberstein:

I really took it the next level. I told you my highlight of the week is writing those.

Crystal Carter:

That's absolutely stonking introduction. I think I'm really excited to be talking about this because it's a fascinating part of the SERP, and I'm going to just shower him with praise now before we get into it, because I know that Mark Williams-Cook is a fairly humble person. But also, it's literally just the best tool. You said it was the best tool.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's so good.

Crystal Carter:

It's such a good tool. I spoke to a team of designers about SEO and all this sort of stuff and I was like, "Oh, there's these great tools. Try this one. It's free. It's really easy to use." And they were like, "This is amazing. This is so good." And I was like, "I know. I know the dude who made it, he is super nice as well and really smart and he just made this thing and it's really useful and you can just see it all spread out really-"

Mordy Oberstein:

It's super useful.

Crystal Carter:

Super useful, super clever, super intuitive. You don't need loads of time to go into it. Anyway, it's great.

Mordy Oberstein:

Check out alsoask.com, or I'm sure we're going to get into more when Mark joins us. We actually did a tool time about this way, way, way early on in the tool time segment we do once in a while. Okay, so let's do a little intro on People Also Ask and then we'll bring Mark on.

So I like to call People Also Ask, I'm going to call it PAA, People Also Ask, for short because People Also Ask takes me a long time to say it and I'm out of water.

Crystal Carter:

We're done.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm going to go with PAA.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

I call it the universal SERP feature. By the way, those not familiar with the PAA box, when you type a query on Google, very often you'll get a series of four questions, sometimes three, sometimes two, but usually four. And then you expand the question to get a snippet of content with the URL ahat kind of answers your question. Then you can go into the actual webpage to get more information about it. It all sits under a header goal, People Also Ask.

So these questions relate to the original query. So if I were to Google who is the captain of the Starship Enterprise, I'd get four questions on the SERP under a header that says People Also Ask. And the four questions are, how is this night different than all other nights? No, sorry, wrong four questions again. Who are the captains of the USS Enterprise in order? Who is the captain of the Enterprise after Kirk? Who was the first captain of the Enterprise before Kirk? And who is the greatest Starship captain?

Obviously it's Kirk. If I expand one of these tabs-

Crystal Carter:

It's Picard.

Mordy Oberstein:

I know, Crystal and I have a hotly contested issue, but if I expand one of these tabs, I get a snippet of content that answers who was the greatest Starship captain and usually a URL to visit that page where the snippet of content came from.

And according to Semrush, People Also Ask shows up on 65% of SERPs, which is insane. And I've done a few survey of the SERP studies in the past, once at Rank Ranger, once at Semrush, and one thing that I liked to look at was how often SERP features pair up together. How often do you see a feature snippet in a local pack? Almost never. Almost never.

How often do you see a People Also Ask box with another SERP feature? And it's very, very often why I call it the universal donor of SERP features, and it makes it super powerful. Showing up here can be a great way to drive traffic to your website, and that's why we're honored to have Captain Cook, not Captain Kirk, Captain Cook, the Captain of Candor and Also Ask here right now with us to talk about People Also Ask and content and quality. So, oh, he's here right now. Oh, hi Mark.

Mark Williams-Cook:

Hello. I'm having a wonderful time already. What an intro. What an intro.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a vibe. It's a vibe.

Crystal Carter:

Welcome to the podcast and welcome to the vibe. Welcome to the vibe.

Mark Williams-Cook:

Thank you. Super excited to talk to you about PAAs. I'll also be calling them PAAs. I can only say People Also Ask so many times.

Crystal Carter:

Exactly. So yeah, we're going to stick with some acronyms as we get into the SERP. We should also explain the SERP one, search engine results pages for any folks who are unacquainted.

Mordy Oberstein:

So you're right, SERP is a fancy word for the results page on Google.

Crystal Carter:

Exactly, exactly.

Mordy Oberstein:

Again, results page, you say too many times. SERP, it just rolls off the tongue. So before we get started, please full on plug for Also Ask.

Mark Williams-Cook:

Yes, cool. So thank you for the lovely introduction, by the way. You pretty much nailed it. So Also Asked is a tool that essentially saves you a whole bunch of time. You can go there, type in your query as you would in Google, and it will return a graphical map of what I call the nearest intent proximity terms to that question.

We've got some more advanced features. So you can do things like customize the country and language you want to do the search in. So Google obviously, although PAAs are generally generated and mostly in English and they're done by language more than region, the results do vary. So rather than spending money on a VPN and trying to get them yourself, you can do that with Also Asked.

We've also got the ability to do this in bulk. And by bulk, I mean you can upload a thousand queries at a time, which will mean on average you'll get between 25,000 and 50,000 questions in a download, which we made in a few minutes.

And it also gives you, as you mentioned, the actual snippet as well that's showing on the page the URL. So there's lots of other interesting things you can do with that data, especially now people are building their own tool workflows using LLMs like ChatGPT. So there's lots of really interesting analysis you can do at scale on what Google's ranking.

But it's mainly there to be accessible to everyone. So we actually, I demonstrated, because because we've been using as an agency PAA data for many years, and I demonstrated at a conference a command line tool we were using to do something similar, thinking lots of people were doing this. And feedback afterwards was like, "Wow, how do we do this?"

And I think that bar for knowing a bit of Python and stuff is actually higher than you realize in kind of your bubble of the SEO community, because there's loads of people this tool's great for, like just people that do content, they've got no interest in coding. So that's who it's for.

Crystal Carter:

It's great. And I think also, so in the training that I was doing where I was, again, I was working with some graphic designers trying to get them to think about user intent and the user journey as they're building a website. So I don't necessarily think that they need to be all the way in the weeds on the keyword research and getting into breaking things down into clusters and stuff like that.

But for instance, if you were to enter a search query and you notice that a lot of the things are about where to get something or whatever, if it was coffee and everything was like, where can I get a coffee? Where's the nearest cafe? That sort of thing. And it was all that sort of thing.

Well guess what? As a graphic designer, for instance, that tells you that you should prioritize the location in your design. That tells you that should make it really easy for people to find out where you are to see that sort of thing. And it sort of gives you an idea of the sort of hive mind of how people feel about a particular topic.

Mark Williams-Cook:

Exactly. It's really interesting you touched on clustering already. So clustering, for maybe those who haven't come across it, is when you're putting a bunch of keywords or queries together of a similar topic or with the same intent, that might go in the same kind of place on a website.

And there's loads of different tools obviously that do clustering. And that's a whole other interesting topic because one thing I've learned from seeing loads and loads and loads and loads of PAA data and working with other people doing clustering is that clustering, by definition, can't be objective in that the same query can mean a different thing to different people, as we know.

And even if the query means the same thing to two different people, they might have different background knowledge and therefore their intent is slightly different. And what's really fascinating about this to me is you mentioned you get the four PAA questions when you do a Google search. And when you click on those questions, you get the concertinas out and you get some more related questions.

Now those questions, so say you click on the first question and you get say four more. Those questions that come out in the concertina will be different to if you just re-Google that first question. And I think this has got to do with Google trying to understand the starting point of what you know and where you are in that journey, and each one has its own kind of fingerprint of intent.

So it's one thing I talk to people about. The other really cool thing about this data is, to use the term kind of loosely, you are getting Google's clustering, if you like, on this topic. I call it intent proximity because I think what we're actually seeing is a probabilistic, if someone searches for this, this is the next most likely thing they are going to be asking. Which gives you a great path, as you were saying, to go down on your content. So what should we be focusing on?

Crystal Carter:

Right. And I think that what we've seen before when we've done, because we have a feature that's where we play a game with People Also Ask. And what we sometimes found, I think on one of the ones that we did was migration. And sometimes what you find in terms of that path in Google trying to figure out what the next thing is, sometimes that the People Also Asks are very mixed. The intent is very mixed.

They're like, are you talking about migration for data? Are you talking about migration of people? Are you talking about migration of animals? And Google's like, what do you want here? And that can tell you that this is a complicated SERP and things like that. So yeah, that's interesting.

Mark Williams-Cook:

A hundred percent. So I think Google uses it for query refinement as well. So when you've got a query and Google's kind of like, eh, I'm not really sure what you mean by that because 20% of people wanted this and another 20% wanted this. So it's like another tool for Google to bridge that gap, where apart from the terrifying amount of data they have on everyone, it's kind of-

Mark Williams-Cook:

Apart from the terrifying amount of data they have on everyone, it's a little bit in that context we don't know.

Mordy Oberstein:

Before we get too far into the weeds on this, let's zoom out for a second. How do I actually get into the PAA box? That's the first thing. I think you have to realize if I Google how to make a bagel, I get a couple of recipe car results. Then the first thing I get right after that is the People Also Ask box. Not only does this show up on a lot of result pages, it shows up really, really high.

You'll see in SEO tools all over the place, they're tracking and telling you when you're in the PAA box, when your competitors are in the PAA box. But the question is how to actually get in it. I've seen a lot of content about this and no one really talks about just the overall quality of your website and the overall quality of your content. It's usually very checklist-y, "Yeah, here's how you get into the PAA box." But since we're here, how do you get into the PAA box and does quality content matter? I know it's a very general question, but maybe let's just start there and see where it goes.

Mark Williams-Cook:

Start with a bombshell, quality content doesn't matter.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, only core web vitals matter.

Mark Williams-Cook:

So one thing I'm happy to talk about, one thing I'll caveat before I start on this is a lot of people go into Also Ask thinking it is a tool to get you into PAAs. And I tell people that's not the goal. The goal here is more what Crystal was talking about, which is we want to write about this topic, what should we be saying? What should we be answering? And that's a broader strategy thing. But specifically I have found some nice ways to steal PAAs from people. And this was when, again, I was looking through all the data we were getting on PAAs.

An interesting thing I found is that from what I can tell, the question that Google displays in the PAA is driven from user typed queries, not necessarily what is on the webpage that is hosting the answer. And actually there's data to suggest that Google even sometimes tidies up those queries that they're showing in PAAs. They're not always exactly how people type them.

Now, Google is always playing this probability game of, okay, I think this webpage is answering this question on this section, so I will show this say as a featured snippet or in a PAA. And there's been loads of times we know where Google has embarrassed itself where it's shown horribly incorrect information as a feature snippet or in PAAs. And that's going to happen on the scale that they're doing things.

So they're always going to lump for what they can be most sure is correct because it's a hard job. Because there's no actual structure to the web. You can make any HTML you like and search engines have to come along and be like, "What's going on here? I think this is here." So this sounds kind of lame, but one thing I've done is where I've seen PAA questions that I think are relevant, literally citing the actual question and using FAQ page schema on the page to mark it up because it allows Google to then say, "Well, this page I've got the answer from, I think they're answering this question here. Whereas this page, I've got almost the identical query and they've structured data up for me the exact answer here so I can be more sure that this is correct."

Now, there's a fine line here because Google has specifically said we don't use structured data as an algorithmic thing, but we do use it to help understand your content better, which to me is very-

Mordy Oberstein:

The same thing in a way.

Mark Williams-Cook:

... much the same thing. If they understand you are providing the specific answer to that specific question at a higher certainty than someone else, it's more likely you'll be in there. There are of course other factors that's not going to guarantee you get it.

We've seen tests where people have done stuff like blocked their website completely from search engines and then opened it up for crawling again and they've lost their PAAs, featured snippets and they don't get them back. So there does seem to be some queuing system and user interaction thing that's going on there for Google to assess as well if it is a good answer.

So I think potentially if Google has already an A plus answer there, you might not be able to steal it very easily. If they've got one they're still on the fence about and you provide these other signals, I think that could be a way in.

Crystal Carter:

In my experience, I've seen it, I don't know if you've seen this as well. So my favorite is where there's a PAA and it doesn't actually answer the question. And I'm like, "We could do that."

Mark Williams-Cook:

A hundred percent, exactly.

Crystal Carter:

And the FAQs are great and the scheme is great, but you can also do it with headers and your blog title and things like that, making sure that you're saying, I don't know, what should you wear to climb Mount Everest or whatever? And maybe somebody's saying to climb a mountain, you should do this. Maybe you actually know which actual things you need to climb specifically Mount Everest. Maybe you need a special something or other and you can answer that.

The other one that I've seen, I don't know if you've also seen this as well, is that the current ranking PAA is old. It's like five, seven years old and you're like-

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes, there's a lot of them like that.

Crystal Carter:

We got some new stuff. Y'all have been ranking for a while. It's my time now.

Mark Williams-Cook:

It's my time to shine now.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's weird to me because when you look at those older results, oh, I should give you an example. So in this case of how to make a bagel, one of the questions is, do all bagels have to be boiled? Where do you think the answer would come from? Probably a Food Network website or food.com or allrecipes.com. It's coming from npr.org from 2015.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. If you're Einstein Bros. Bagels, you could get that, Einstein Bros., if you're listening. I'm just saying.

Mordy Oberstein:

But it's just weird to me that Google doesn't default to those kinds of websites to begin with. That's what's going to show up in the recipe card. That's going to show up. The organic results are all the greatkneeder.com or Sally's Baking Addiction or Sophisticated Gourmet, they're all food sites. But the People Also Ask seems to be a different thing going on sometimes.

Mark Williams-Cook:

One of the interesting bits of feedback we've had from customers have also asked is, "Oh, I've typed this query," and they're in the UK and I'm getting us results, say about Walmart or something. And my understanding is that while a lot of features are engineered from what is in the index and are looking at or relying quite heavily on other Google metrics they have about websites, the PAA stuff seems to rely heavily on a language model. And there's a couple of reasons why I think this.

So firstly is there's a massive bias towards the English language. PAAs are actually quite rare in a lot of other languages, even in European languages. Because I get this, again, I get lots of support feedback like, "Oh, I did this search in the Netherlands and there's no results" or something. And I think that's because the way they're building these maps of intent is on a language, not website country basis.

Because the other really interesting thing about linguistics is intent is very much sewn into a language. And you come across that when you do international projects and people are like, "Oh no, no, no, no, don't just translate, localize. Because you can't just translate this, that's not how people ask these questions." So when you are trying to do what Google or achieve what Google's trying to achieve, which is this essentially linguistic map of intent and next questions, it has to be from a language, not a structural web basis.

So that's why very commonly I see English US and English UK very weirdly mixed in those results. And I think why at the moment we see so many fewer results in other languages. I just think it's a really interesting point because it's the only feature I'm aware of I think that is built that way, where the geography actually has very little impact on the end result. That seems to be changing over time because we monitor how many no results we get from searches across different languages and countries.

And especially Google's been talking about all these multimodal models they've got, and I think we're coming close to the point where they're like "Translation is solved." Because they've got their real time text in one language, the intent is coming out the other side, not just a machine translation, which I think is going to again, explode PAAs across the world, because at the minute I don't realize because I'm a monoglot, I'm very English focused, I can't look into these other sets. But that's what I'm seeing from a data point of view and customer feedback.

Mordy Oberstein:

Do you feel then quality for, say you have the helpful content up, that you have quality for a website, it's a very holistic thing. Do you think that quality for People Also Ask answer is just micro-focused and not macro-focused? They're just looking at the actual content for the answer. As long as your site is not like crap, you're not on a malicious site, it's not a spammy site. Whether or not your site is topically connected very specifically doesn't seem to matter from what I see in a lot of cases. So does that mean quality is less holistic for the People Also Ask box?

Mark Williams-Cook:

I would say within reason, yes, because it's more focused on this language model. I do think Google takes the quality of the site in general into consideration because again, it's gambling by putting you at the very forefront. It's betting on you being good and not malicious or just outright wrong. So I do think there's a overall reputational aspect that is considered. But again, when I use the actual functional as a digital matter as an SEO, when I use PAA data, I see it, as I said, more as a way to improve my site quality overall.

So to give you an example, really common basic questions we have people using PAA data is do I need to create a single page for each one of these questions? And the answer is like absolutely not. Don't do that. And at the moment, like many things we do in SEO, I feel the tactics that are serving well and why they're working well is because as content creators you are filling a technological gap that Google hasn't quite bridged yet.

Let me give you an example of this. When Google back in May, 2020x talked about mum for the first time, they gave the example, actually I think you had touched on, Crystal about climbing Mount Fuji and what do I need? And one of the things that interested me there was, they were saying these queries on average take nine searches to complete. And one of the long-term goals of this system was, well, all of those questions aren't answered in one place. So this system we've got can grab information from around the web and dynamically generate you your closest intent proximity all in one place.

And I think we're way off that working well yet, and certainly what we've seen with the SGE stuff. But using PAA data I think is the next logical step to achieve that for users, for Google on your website. And when we're talking about, because it's tied into this topical authority, I think sometimes, not present company, but I've seen some people interpret topical authority as we need lots of pages on this topic. Whereas to use a human example, I have a specific friend I would ask if I wanted to buy a new car their advice. They're not necessarily my best friend, but over the years they've fed me small answers to lots of questions I've had about cars. So I now trust them for the big questions.

And I think that's where PAAs fit in with this content quality, which is, yeah, look, okay, we've got a client that does drug rehab stuff, big, heavy competitive search terms. You can't just come in swinging trying to rank for alcohol addiction. You need to demonstrate that you have the answers to all of the small questions and build up the trust in exactly the same way we work as humans together. I won't go and trust someone with a big decision, with a big question until over a period of time they've drip fed me this knowledge and showed their understanding. And to me that's more topical authority about it. It's not number of pages, any of this. It's about this intent, proximity and building from the ground up.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And it's relevant topical authority. It should be relevant. So you wouldn't ask your mechanic friend about how to stop smoking cigarettes. They're not the same type of topic knowledge.

I think what the other thing that you touched on is different networks of knowledge around Google. And my experience on search and working with clients and stuff, the thing I've seen is that you very often see featured snippets content showing up in lots of different places around the web. And sorry, People Also Ask content.

Crystal Carter:

... in lots of different places around the web. And sorry, people also ask content showing up in lots of different places around the web, including featured snippets, also knowledge panels, also little dropdown, things like that. Are you able to speak on a little bit of that and how PAAs can help people to be displayed in some more of those content spaces around the SERP? Do you think that it has to be a very specific query that allows you to achieve that, or can it be a little bit fuzzier?

Mark Williams-Cook:

Yeah, it definitely can be a bit fuzzier. So obviously I gave the example of if I want to try and nab a PAA of someone, I've been very targeted in that and verbatim written the question out. That's sometimes a tactic I will use if we're operating in super competitive areas because it can be a lot easier to grab a featured snippet or grab a PAA. There's a lot that goes into the normal 10 pack ranking, links, all that kind of stuff. And it takes time to do that. Sometimes you can just punch out of your weight and be like, "Here's a great answer to this very specific thing," and get some nice traffic.

In general, when we're doing content planning and writing, I don't think it's beneficial always for the user to have content that's structured in a question, answer, question, answer, question, answer, because that doesn't make for good reading. I think, again, without sounding like a Google spokesperson, there's a way to write the content that makes it an optimal user experience for web. And by that I mean there, to me, is a middle ground between if I go to New York Times and I want to read a long form well-written article by an author I like versus I transactionally want to understand the answer to this question. I think there's a middle ground that we see quite a lot on the web, a good use of headers, things like this that indicates very quickly to the user where they can find that specific information and written in a way that a machine can understand that. I'm confident we're at that stage now where machines can pick out those answers.

I've covered previously before Google updates around passage indexing, BERT, and stuff that help with that, but we've seen it, I think, on a wider scale with things like ChatGPT. So one of the uses I have for ChatGPT in terms of what we're talking about is I will sometimes have a list of PAA questions and I can give ChatGPT a URL and I can say, "Put into a table yes or no if these questions are answered in this text." And even ChatGPT is good enough to, at very high accuracy, tell me if... There is the fuzzy answer in there. It doesn't have to be the exact question, but it's like, "Yeah, I've picked out that, that and that."

And that's again, a way at scale we can kind of analyze maybe what's missing from our pages when we get this raw data, but it's a good indication as well if we've got publicly accessible tools for 20 bucks that can do this. Google's been doing this quite a while and it's very key to what they're at. And we've seen it again with clients. We've got our own projects here where we've prepared content briefs based on this data, but we don't to mostly answer the exact question. And yes, we're still ranking for it. That's the other advantage with the PAA data. So it's really the speed at which it updates. So when we were having a new prime minister in the UK, we were tracking hourly updates. Every few hours, the questions were changing. When there's a new episode of like

Crystal Carter:

Is it a lettuce?

Mark Williams-Cook:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's amazing. Super quick.

Mark Williams-Cook:

Yeah. So that's the other kind of, I guess, advantage you get with PAA stuff when it comes to content briefs, which is you get the new questions, the new intent before they flow downstream into bigger keyword tools. I mean, ChatGPT as a search term was, for well over a month after launch, saying, "Zero search volume," and all this when there was millions of people searching for it because it takes a while to get downstream, but you type that into Google and immediately you had PAAs and what people were asking about it.

Mordy Oberstein:

If there's a PAA there, then people are asking about it because otherwise, if no one's asking about it, why would there be a PAA?

Mark Williams-Cook:

Exactly.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a great point.

Mark Williams-Cook:

Last point on this would be your bagel kind of thing when we're talking about car mechanics and stuff and site quality, which is again, I do see some your money, your life type filtering in PAAs and I think that drastically affects, again, if you are going to rank there. To use that mechanic example as Google, if I've got a topic where I don't really understand it, sometimes I'll just default to my best friend kind of thing, which is maybe why sites like NPR are ranking for bagels because Google's kind of like, "Bagels are not really that important. That's a good website."

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm from New York, dude. Bagels are very important.

Mark Williams-Cook:

From a YMYL perspective.

Mordy Oberstein:

All right. All right.

Mark Williams-Cook:

Maybe I need to localize my knowledge there. I seemed to have hit a nerve. But yeah, I think that plays a big factor as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's funny because I wonder if this'll change, but one of the things I've always tried to do when I'm either trying to optimize for a featured snippet or the same thing applies for a PAA question is, okay, I'm writing content, I'm writing a blog post, I'm writing naturally, and I write a header and the header's a question. I'm like, "Oh, wait a second, this is perfect." The first thing I'll do, even though I might not have done this otherwise, is I'll answer the question very explicitly in the first two lines. So if I'm asking, "Do all bagels need to be boiled?" Next line, "All bagels need to be boiled because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."

And then the next paragraph, I'll start what I really wanted to start with, and I know it's a little bit like hmmm but maybe not the best thing to do, but it does kind of work. Google does make that connection between okay, header, answer. And for the most part it's pretty natural way of writing and I feel like that's kind of a good way of balancing I want to have the questions, but I also want to write in a way where the user gets to the page. It's going to seem kind of seamless.

Crystal Carter:

Also, I think Mark's talked lots about intent as well, and I think that if you click on a PAA for a question, you want the answer to the question.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes.

Mark Williams-Cook:

Yes. I mean I don't think anyone would disagree with that. I mean that's like a newspaper way of writing where you give the big facts and then you step back. To me, there's nothing I can use there.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes, I just don't enjoy that kind of writing as a person, but I get that most people do, and from my personal preference, I don't. Yeah.

Mark Williams-Cook:

Do you not enjoy reading that kind of writing?

Mordy Oberstein:

No, I don't enjoy reading it. I don't enjoy writing it.

Mark Williams-Cook:

Oh, interesting.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm a weirdo. I'm a content snob, but that is the way to do it.

Mark Williams-Cook:

Do you like the suspense or something as you're building up to the actual answer? Like, "Do these bagels need to be boiled?"

Mordy Oberstein:

I like a narrative to build up. I want the background. I want to be able to build a scheme, like a knowledge scheme. When you just tell with the answer right away, I lose interest.

Mark Williams-Cook:

Okay. That's really interesting.

Mordy Oberstein:

I like the suspense.

Mark Williams-Cook:

And then the crescendo of, "Yes, they need to be boiled."

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes, it does. Right. "Well, boiling bagels first started because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Historically-

Mark Williams-Cook:

Mordy, you should open a recipe website.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's exactly what I should be doing.

Crystal Carter:

Classic. Absolutely classic. Totally agree. It's my understanding that Mordy makes a mean General Tso's chicken. I'm just saying that. I haven't had it yet, but it's my understanding that it's very good.

Mordy Oberstein:

It is, and I made the sauce from scratch before also.

Mark Williams-Cook:

I'd love to hear more about the history of that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, I'll tell you.

Crystal Carter:

There's a movie on Netflix.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm writing a book about it. It's coming out hardcover and soft cover. You can find it at a store near you soon. I'm not joking. I'll write a book now about General Tso's chicken. Mark, where can people find you?

Mark Williams-Cook:

People can no longer find me on X, unfortunately. Maybe one day I'll be back. I'm the taffer boy there. Same on most platforms actually. I'm currently most active on LinkedIn. I'm the only Mark Williams-Cook on LinkedIn. So search me out. You'll find me. I'm also on this new thing called Threads, which I'm trying to go out. Yeah. So again, the taffer boy.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm there too. I'm there too. So come on over.

Mark Williams-Cook:

Yeah. You were the first person actually that Threaded me. Is that right? Threaded?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes.

Mark Williams-Cook:

Yeah. You were like, "Hey, we can communicate again."

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, because you were off X.

Mark Williams-Cook:

X. Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

For a while. I'm like, "You're gone and this is terrible." I really enjoyed having you on the platform, but now you're back on Threads.

Mark Williams-Cook:

Yeah, LinkedIn's probably best if you want to find me. Maybe I'll be back to X one day if it's still a thing. But I'm trying to make a thing of Threads. I'm hyping it for people.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

Nice.

Mark Williams-Cook:

Everyone's still a bit like, "Eh."

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm there. I'm there. I'm there.

Mark Williams-Cook:

Yeah, we've still got access to X, so we'll kind of be there, but we'll check in with you once a week.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thanks, Mark. Check out AlsoAsked. Check out Candour. They also have a great podcast with Candour. Jack Chambers-Ward hosts that with you. So check that out as well, and check out AlsoAsked, which I said again for the third time, but check out AlsoAsked, and we will link to the tool in the show notes. Thanks, Mark.

Mark Williams-Cook:

Thanks for having me both. Appreciate it. Had a lot of fun.

Crystal Carter:

Absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much.

Mordy Oberstein:

Bye.

Thank you again. And Mark, it's one thing to talk about PAAs and content quality. It's another to actually know how to write a quality answer to a question, which is why we're going deep with the help of the co-owner of Content remix. Kaleigh Moore is here to help us understand what it means to really answer a user's question. So before Crystal and I weigh in, here's what Kaleigh had to say.

Kaleigh Moore:

In order to answer a user's pain points accurately, I think the first thing you have to do is really understand what your customers' or your users' pain points are, and there's no cheating this. So you have to really do the homework to figure out what those are. And that means speaking to your users, talking to your support team if that's something you have access to. What are the frequently asked questions? Figuring out what those are. Just really understanding the dynamic that you need to create with your customers and their actual true pain points. I think it's easy to guess at these. I think it's easy to build customer personas that sound really good on the page, but they're not accurate if you haven't done the legwork of actually having those one-to-one conversations with real users who not only just use the product or whatever it is occasionally, but use it a lot and really know the ins and outs can give you some actually valuable perspective.

When you're writing an answer to these questions that is supposed to address these pain points, that's the biggest piece of the puzzle is just doing that homework, figuring out what the true pain points are and then answering them in depth. So not just breezing through them, giving a quick answer that somebody could scan through and read through in under a minute. We're talking about giving examples, giving context, showing actual use cases of how the pain point is addressed in real time.

Again, you're not just getting on the surface here, you're going deep. You're giving them some true actionable insight on how they can solve the pain point. And I think that that's a difficult thing to do. I think a lot of people often cheat this and will do the quick and easy thing and just guess at the pain points and then provide a very generic answer or even use something like AI to kick out an answer that's good enough, but a really, really good job at this, it takes work. It takes some time and energy and it's not a quick fix. So it's something you have to really do your homework on.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I think one of the things that really is interesting to me these days that I've been really harping on a lot lately is that we always talk about empathy when you're marketing, right? When I want to market something, I really need to empathize with the audience. I really to understand their pain points. But I think one of the things that Kaleigh is kind of alluding to that it's really more than that. When you are able to answer user's questions, and I think it comes in from a branding point of view, you're able to demonstrate something that's really powerful and that's, "I understand you and I'm in it with you. We're together with this. I understand your problems. I have a solution for you. Here's the answer."

And it creates not just, "Okay, the user feels like, I understand that you have the answer for me, you understand me," it's that we're together. There's an identification that takes place where the person answering the question and the person asking the question bond and they see each other. So it's not just like you see your users and your users see you, it's that you both see each other together and you both kind of identify with each other and answering questions in a way where you really understand the audience tells your audience that they can trust you, that they're somebody that they can identify with. Once they identify with-

Mordy Oberstein:

They're somebody that they can identify with, and once they identify with you, then they'll buy from you.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that when it's in APA they'll say, "Oh, there's APA for that." Then when they get the answer and it's like, "Oh, you already know how to solve this problem, you already know the answer to this question. That means that you have already tried this path." I mean, again, I'm not alone. I can fix this. You know how to do all of these things. And that is so, so powerful because if you think about, I don't know, hospitality or something, if you sit down at the table and you're like, "Can I have..." And they're like, "Here's your glass of water," and you're like, "Do you have that?" They're like, "Here's that lovely bowl of bread." And you're like, "Oh my gosh, thanks guys.

This is great. This is here for me." That is a really powerful experience. And like you said, it builds a relationship with the person and especially when they're searching for that topic, and we were talking about topic knowledge, topic authority. When they're searching generally in that topic, if they keep finding answers from you, then that builds up that trust, that builds up that really powerful relationship.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, because I think what it comes down to, if you were to ask what does a conversion fundamentally come down to, I feel like it's the idea that the person who's buying from you sees themselves in you, right? That's usually what trust fundamentally is. Okay, we always talk about trust. Let's get real deep here. We talk about trust and authority, all these kind of things a lot. We talk about a lot on this podcast, but what is that fundamentally is that I see myself in you.

I trust myself. I trust me. If I'm able to see myself in you, then I'll trust you. And that's how trust works. And when you answer questions and you demonstrate that you understand me, and now I see that you get me, now I start seeing myself in you and I start to really be able to trust you, and now I will buy from you.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And I think we mentioned recipe things for instance, and recipes are quite personal, for instance, because there's a lot of dietary things that people have to consider and stuff like that. So if I look up a recipe for a chocolate cake and I go, "Wait, but what about for dairy free?" And they're like, "I got that for you. This is what you do if you're dairy free." And you're like, "Oh, okay, well, what about gluten-free?" And they're like, "Oh, well, I got that for you too.

That's right here." And like, "Well, what about this and that?" And you're like, "Well, I've got that right here, sugar-free right there for you. Don't worry. It's all fine. I got you." And that is a fundamental trust, that they already know what you need. And it's like if somebody comes to your house and you make sure, it's like a hospitality sort of thing, you make sure that people feel welcome. You make sure that people know that you thought about what they needed. So we were talking about answering the questions like you answer the question to the best of your ability with all of the information that you have available, and let them know, "Yeah, we wrote a guide on this last week. Or Hey, here's a video that'll help you do it, or here's some pictures that will illustrate it better for you." And that again, builds trust.

And I think, yeah, when you see that they understand your perspective, they understand your need, that builds trust. And she was saying that there's no shortcuts in this, and she's absolutely right. You have to look at your actual data. I did an article on user first keyword research stuff, and this is when you go to your customer service people and go, "What are the things that people are asking about our product?" And they say, "They always ask this," and it's like, "Okay, well, we need to answer that question because they're always asking it." And sometimes it can be a little bit manual. Sometimes you have to talk to people who maybe are on the front lines a little bit, and sometimes you have to sit down and do some actual qualitative, messy research, and it's useful.

Mordy Oberstein:

You really have to get in their mindset. You really have to understand where that person's coming from because again, answering the question means a lot more than just answering a question.

It means a lot. It's the foundation of establishing a relationship. So thank you, Kaleigh. Make sure you check out Kaleigh over on Twitter or X, I don't know what we're calling it anymore these days. We're recording this right after Twitter rebranded. That's over @kaleighf on Twitter. That's K-A-L-E-I-G-H-F. And also check out kaleighmoore.com. I'll link to both in the show notes. Thank you again, Kaleigh, so much. You know why I always feel gets me, I see myself in because of all the information that he gives me?

Crystal Carter:

And also because he can help settle SEO arguments when someone's like, "Nah," and you're like, "Uh-huh," and they're like, "Nah." And you're like, "Uh-huh." You can get on there and you can go, "Well-

Mordy Oberstein:

Barry said. Barry has an article.

Crystal Carter:

Barry said that this person said this. Barry said that that person said that. Barry said this. Barry referenced this change in the documentation there on this date here at that time. He's amazing.

Mordy Oberstein:

And here he is with this week's snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Two for you today. First up, from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, add social media links to your Google Business profiles as Spotify last week's guest, Elizabeth Rule. You can now manage which links, which social media platforms Google shows in your Google business profile. Rule of thumb, if Google gives you control, take it. If you're an SEO, a business owner, why not control the social media profiles and accounts that show up in the businesses profile? Okay. Big stuff on the AI front as covered again by Barry Shores, but this time on search engine land, Google search generative experience adds SGE while browsing. Basically on some webpage and on some browsers, you can have Google's SGE create a summary of the page you're looking at. It's basically cliff notes for a webpage, and the implications of widespread adoption are huge.

If the user just goes to the summary and they don't see all of your CTAs, they don't see all of the banner ads, or they don't get the full branding and authority benefit because they're not seeing all of the content on the page, what does that mean for the website? Google has said you cannot opt out of this feature as of yet, but paywall content does not work with the feature. Which brings up another vital question about the ecosystem. Are we going to see more paywalled content? Along with this change, Google's SGE can now give you a definition of a word within its generative text summary for a query in certain instances via hover over, which is kind of cool. Quick reminder, SGE is not seen across the world, so if you don't have access or if you don't see it when using Google, that's nothing to worry about because it's just not rolled out to half the planet yet. And that's this week's snappy news.

Always so snappy, always so interesting, always so digestible. That's our snappy news is for you.

Crystal Carter:

No, it's not a digestible, it's a digestive is another name for like a cookie.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. So I'm not from the UK, but they have them here, and I never saw them when I lived in the US. I'm like, "What is this? It sounds like something, if I have stomach problems, I need a digestive." Yeah, but it's not, they're delicious.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, they're totally fine. They're totally enjoyable.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's just regular cookies.

Crystal Carter:

But it sounds medicinal.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, right? Somehow they got past the branding there and people buy the... I don't know.

Crystal Carter:

Americans are like, "Chips Ahoy, Oreos."

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. Oreos.

Crystal Carter:

Like, oh, Nilla Wafers or whatever.

Mordy Oberstein:

Dunkaroos.

Crystal Carter:

Dunkaroos, UK digestives.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, speaking of the UK, you know who's from the UK and who also works at Candour, which is the agency that Mark Williams Cook owns. It's Jack Chambers Ward, and he is our follow of the week. Hey, Jack, you're a follow of the week. Follow Jack on Twitter, @jlwchambers, C-H-A-M-B-E-R-S. We'll link to the profile in the show knows, but we love Jack. Jack is an all time favorite.

Crystal Carter:

We love Jack so much. Jack is so fantastic. He is a fantastic cornhole player, is much better than all of the other competition at cornhole.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, he'd be so bad at BrightonSEO cornhole. It wasn't even funny. I am looking forward to a rematch in three years from now when I'm able to go back to BrightonSEO in the UK.

Crystal Carter:

He is-

Mordy Oberstein:

But if you want to come to BrightonSEO at San Diego, Jack, if you're listening, I'm there and we will find a place to play cornhole and I'll have my revenge.

Crystal Carter:

I should also shout out that Jack Chambers Ward also does a fantastic podcast for Pandora Agency, and he's also really good at voice stuff.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes.

Crystal Carter:

He does like a Jean-Luc Picard vocal thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

Imitation. Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

He's great.

Crystal Carter:

Those things.

Mordy Oberstein:

Very talented.

Crystal Carter:

He's great. He's really great at the vocal stuff. And yeah, he's a great super nice guy, super smart, and does podcast things at events and is a fantastic follow. Do you follow Jack?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. And if you have a question, he's such a sweet guy, happy to answer any questions you have. So if you have an SEO question, ask Jack. Ask Jack. All right, Jack, we got to hit the road, Jack. This is the end of the show. You Hit the Road Jack music. Who sings that? I don't know. That's a classic.

Crystal Carter:

That's Ray Charles.

Mordy Oberstein:

Hit the road Jack is Ray Charles?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Hit the Road Jack.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm not thinking of the original version. I'm thinking of someone did a newer version. Wow. I'm not bad. Usually I know that stuff.

Crystal Carter:

It's definitely Ray Charles, Jamie Lee Fox as Jamie Lee Fox. Not Jamie Lee Fox, Jamie Fox, not Jamie Lee Fox. That's Jamie Lee Curtis. I've combined two human beings there.

Mordy Oberstein:

There you go. It is Ray Charles, but there's someone else who did it more recently, and when I say more recent, I mean, like 30, 40 years ago, who I'm thinking of. Anyway, wow.

Crystal Carter:

It's a big song.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, I knew that, and I feel totally embarrassed now. Before I embarrass myself any further with any other music reference that I don't know, but I should know, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a brand new episode as we dive into is SEO part of marketing? Look forward wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO learning hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO. Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it, at wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us your review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love and SEO.