How to Research and Optimize for Questions

by | Jan 30, 2019

Research and optimize for questions. It’s as simple as that. Otherwise, you’re missing out on opportunities to engage customers and drive more traffic to your site.

Questions are valuable for many reasons:

  • Question research is excellent content inspiration.
  • Questions are engaging and trigger a natural reflex to answer.
  • Questions are useful for audience research.
  • Question research gives you a better understanding of natural language for voice search.
  • Question optimization increases your organic search visibility.

Types of Questions and How to Categorize Them

Basic questions: These typically define concepts. Those searching for them are looking for quick answers.

How-to questions: These typically include step-by-step questions.

Branded questions: These typically include a brand name or product name.

Online research questions: These are typically specific questions that relate directly to your product. Examples are pros and cons or reviews.

These include:

  • High-intent questions, such as asking how to buy.
  • Navigational questions about site navigation.
  • Competitive research questions, such as brand comparisons.
  • Reputation questions, such as concern your company culture.

Regarding basic and how-to questions, the query may only have the intent of searching for information. That said, there’s always a possibility that this question is searched with the intent to purchase.

How to Discover Questions with Tools

“People Also Ask” Tool

The “People Also Ask” tool from Google contains related questions to a given query. Not a lot of information is available on how Google generates these. We can assume that these questions would only be shown if there are enough queries to justify them.

More space is taken up in the search engine results by the “People Also Ask” tool. Showing up in more search engine results with one query is a valuable aspect of organic search visibility.

The “People Also Ask” tool is important for content marketing. The tool offers insight into the searches of the target audience. It boosts organic search visibility.

Google Search Engine Results Page

Search results provide a lot of information about terms and concepts from search engine results pages, if you analyze them properly. A Text Optimizer tool will extract terms and concepts from the search engine results pages and analyzes them to provide a list of questions to include in content. This tool will expand on the knowledge you gain from the “People Also Ask” tool.

Google Suggest

Google Suggest is a search-based tool that’s designed for content marketers. The search engine autocompletes a query based on the most popular searches from other users. With this in mind, we can assume that Google Suggest results have a significant search volume or demand to end up in the suggested index.

The challenge with Google Suggest is deciding how to start the question to see it completed. First, you type your query in and hit search, then you pull your cursor back to the beginning of the query. If you add “how,” Google will suggest other popular searches.

You can take this a step further by using Serpstat, which is a keyword research tool that gives you niche questions according to your core question. You can also sort the results by the original question and filter questions by the most popular term to organize your results.

Quora

Quora is arguably one of the largest sources of questions online. Unlike some other discussion boards, however, Quora requires users to post discussions in a question form, so it only offers questions.

Quora’s search can be challenging, due to the complex architecture of topics, and it doesn’t show you the most popular questions. The algorithm works on personalization, timeliness, activity and some other factors.

With this in mind, the Buzzsumo Question Analyzer is useful to organize your Quora results. It aggregates results from Quora and other discussion boards. It analyzes your query and generates results, giving you in-depth insight into what searchers are looking for.

Twitter

Though not many content marketers use Twitter for this purpose, it’s an incredible source of content inspiration. Twitter’s question search allows you to see what questions users ask when discussing your brand or product with the following search:

Type [brandname ?] (be sure to include a space) into the search box and you’ll see any questions related to your brand, product or topic.

This can also be used to monitor your competitors and get an idea of what your prospective customers are searching for from them, so you can position yourself to solve customers’ problems better.

How to Include Questions in Your Content

Questions provide a virtually limitless source of content marketing opportunities. Here’s how you can use questions to inform your content:

  • Create a frequently asked questions section that addresses the basic questions that come up in queries often.
  • Develop and optimize your existing content to address common questions.
  • Add Q&A sections to your landing pages, which may also help you get a product page in Google.
  • Develop new content to address a question that lacks satisfying answers.

The value of questions goes far beyond content, however. Question research should involve different departments in your company to maximize your results.

Basic Questions

Basic questions do well with content like glossaries or FAQ. The customer support and sales teams should use this information to adopt the same language or jargon as the customers. The CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) team should be involved as well, since basic questions could be transactional.

How-to Questions

How-to questions do well with content like FAQ and videos. Get your CRO team involved, since these can lead to sales.

Branded Questions

ROPO (Research Online/Purchase Offline) questions: Address these in the form of blog content or tutorials. Optimize for many related brand terms. Have the product management team involved to collect answers and feedback. They should implement product improvements or updates.

High-intent questions: Ask your questions in the form of a product Q&A. Make sure the CRO team and A/B testing expert are around to optimize on-page conversions.

Navigational questions: Frame the questions within a product-specific knowledge base and video tutorials. Get the design team involved to improve usability. Stop solving any existing navigational concerns.

Competitive research questions: Address these questions with specific landing pages and videos that discuss the benefits, as well as being optimized for brand-related terms. Get the product management team to collect feedback and implement improvements. Tell the sales team to learn how to best explain the product benefits to potential customers.

Reputation questions: Use landing pages and videos specific to the query. Tell the reputation management team and social media team to address these questions properly. If you do this, you can ensure your brand has the best possible image.


Read : Keyword Research to Match the Buyer’s Questions


Final Thoughts

Questions are incredibly useful for content marketing inspiration, but they can also provide insights into audience research, conversion optimization and product development. Optimizing for questions also boosts your SEO and ensures that your copy is ready to earn you more organic search visibility.

Researching questions and optimizing for them is a continuous process, however. Over time, you may discover new questions or new ways to find them, offering real-time knowledge that gives your business a competitive edge.