“People Also Ask” is Another Way to Dominate Search

It used to be that if you did all the right things SEO-wise and grabbed that #1 spot in organic search results, you would get a boatload of clicks. Ah, those were the good old days….before Google started cluttering up their SERPs (search engine results pages) with ads, local packs, and answer boxes.  The biggest piece of prime real estate on Google’s search engine results page is still the Answer Box, also known as the featured snippet: The sites that reach the answer box all have one thing in common: they already rank in the top 5 on particular keywords and questions. They also have a high number of referral domains as well as high engagement, telling Google that they are a trusted and verified source for those keywords and questions. So it’s tough to get there. However, in the past 12 months, the “People Also Ask” (PAA) snippet has started to dominate. Why? Because most search queries are questions and Google wants to answer those questions in the most expedient way possible. And it’s also because of the growing popularity of voice assistants (Siri, Alexa, Google Home). According to eMarketer, more than 122 million people will use voice assistants at least once a month this year.

What is “People Also Ask” (PAA)?

To provide an example, we Googled “how do I find a criminal lawyer?” and the PAA box served up these additional results based on Google’s machine learning and related topics: Each of these results provides law firm marketers with the opportunity to craft content that will show up in a PAA, as this firm did: In addition to helping your law firm website’s SEO, the PAA list of questions also provides lots of good content ideas for law firm blogs.

How to get your content featured in PAAs

According to Search Engine Land, there are four ways to get your law firm content featured in the answer box or PAA:

• Create complete questions and answers.
• Use plain language
• Avoid any sales pitches.
• Add Q&A schema

In other words, you need to develop content that answers popular questions about your topic or service in short, plain language or as a bullet list. In addition, Google has heavily hinted about the importance of structured data (schema) — which are tags added to a website’s HTML to improve the way search engines read and display a page in SERPs — by basing many of its new search features on structured data. As the space for organic search results continues to shrink, it will become increasingly important for law firm marketers to develop content that answers a search question as quickly and clearly as possible. If you don’t, someone else will reap the benefits.

Confused about SEO? You are not alone.

Right now there are people searching online for the services your law firm provides. They have typed their legal need into Google and clicked “Search”.  They are a perfect fit for your firm. But they will never find you without SEO. Download our easy to read eBook on “6 Law Firm SEO Strategies to Drive Targeted Leads.”