How to Find People Also Ask Topics That Guarantee Rankings

Why you should read this post: at the end and I’ll show you a DR 11 site that has a page getting 5000+ visits a month with a $1000 traffic value. 

I found it using this technique and it only took a few minutes.

This tip comes straight from yours truly and centers around writing blogs for People Also Ask questions. I have a lot of experience doing this:

You’re looking at the aggregate traffic of 550 blogs based on People Also Ask questions, but if I used this tip (I didn’t create it at the time), it would probably have performed even better!

You’ll need two of my favourite tools:

• SEO Minion
• & Ahrefs

SEO Minion has become my go to SERP extraction tool as of late.
One of my favourite features is the People Also Ask extraction. It’s better than a lot of the other tools I’ve used because it doesn’t just get the question, it gets:

• The question
• The snippet answer
• Title tag
• & the URL (the key to this strategy)

That last one, the URL is the key to this next hack. Just follow these steps. 
Use this tip from my previous notes. In short, put “what is” in front of your keyword and you will generate lots of people also ask questions.

After you’ve installed SEO Minion look for it on the right hand side of the SERP:

Once you click go the PAAs will start expanding like mad.

Wait until your progress indicator gets to 100:

After it’s reached 100% it’ll actually have over 200, snippet answers and URLs. I dump them into a sheet. Make sure to remove duplicates from column C. From here I only copy the URLs:

After you’ve removed duplicates, copy those URLs on your clipboard, head over to Ahrefs Batch Analysis and make sure to just “Exact URL” for the Target Mode.

Here’s where the magic happens. 

Most of the time the People Also Ask question is going to show 0 search volume and I can tell you that many of the blogs in that graph above had 0 search volume for the PAA, but still brought in a massive amount of traffic. What we’re doing here is totally ignoring search volume and just looking at the traffic each one of these pages pulls in.

You’ll want to download this data into a spreadsheet and match it up with the export you got from SEO Minion so that you have the PAA name and answer snippet. Just be sure to remove any duplicates before you paste them into Ahrefs and the order of the URLs will stay the same. Note: batch analysis is limited to 200 URLs at a time.

You can filter by URL by traffic and if you’re a low authority site, you can also focus on the ones with high traffic and low DR — but since you’re an SEO Notebook subscriber, your on-page skills are probably higher than average, so I would encourage you to compete with some of the bigger sites if you feel that your DR is within striking distance. It never hurts to check the SERP first and to stick some related PAAs into a table of contents or jump links.

I created an example sheet for What is Boat Insurance? That combines the SEO Minion and Ahrefs data. Then filtered to traffic over 100, Domain Rating <20. I came up with this gem: “Is there a Kelley Blue Book for Boats? – Better Boat” It’s a DR 11 site, but this page gets over 5000 visits per month according to Ahrefs and has a traffic value of $1000. It has some backlinks (Ahrefs link), but it’s just your typical scraper spam you get by virtue of ranking. The page is nothing special, 1000 words and easily replicable. Just some very strong topic selection.

Pro tip: check the page’s organic keywords in Ahrefs to see what else it’s ranking for an incorporate it into the article. The use a tool like Surfer SEO’s Content Editor (sponsored link) to write an optimized article.

So even if you’re not going all out of writing hundreds of PAA-based blogs, this technique will help you at least find a handful of topics that are pretty much guaranteed to get you traffic. It’s safe to say that the higher your domain rating is, the more opportunities you’ll have!

Next time you’re doing topic selection, give this a shot as it’s a great way to “guarantee” yourself some traffic.

Liked this post? Sign up for weekly strategy emails: seonotebook.com