SEMRush People Also Ask Study Is Out

The People Also Ask (PAA) feature has become an important facet of SEO and content strategies over the past few years. The SEMrush study examined 1,000,000 keywords of US desktop results (random subset from the SEMrush US database) to provide unique insights into the changing landscape of Google search features, as well as an action plan for how you can implement an effective PAA strategy for your own SEO.

Key Findings

• PAA boxes are present in almost half of all searches within our 1,000,000 keyword dataset and are continuing to grow.
• Google is using PAA at least in part for query refinement, giving websites the opportunity for first-page visibility on search terms that were previously too broad to target.
• A PAA SEO strategy is applicable to almost all sectors (industry-specific breakdowns can give you a guide to how much of your overall effort should go into PAA optimization).
• There are opportunities and risks for big brands to control answers where PAA questions are shown on branded search terms.
• Unlike featured snippets, it is possible to both appear in a PAA box and hold a standard organic ranking on page 1 of Google.
• 75% of the time a PAA result appears, it is within the top 3 results in Google, providing a good chance of high visibility.
• Question terms on average will generate PAA 86% of the time.
• Google is mainly taking web text content for PAA results, with 48 % of all PAA boxes being exclusively from text in paragraphs.
• There are still untapped opportunities for video content within PAA boxes, where Google cannot find any suitable results.
• As with other types of rich results, brevity is key with paragraph results averaging only 41 words.