31.05.2026

49 min listen

With & Chris Green

Season 4 Episode 73

Does answering People Also Ask questions improve rankings?

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Chris Green joins Search with Candour to share his study on whether answering Google’s “People Also Ask” (PAA) questions correlates with higher organic rankings.

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01

Key takeaways

  • Across the top 5 positions, pages that fully answer more PAA questions tend to rank higher.

  • Commercial and transactional queries show the strongest correlations; navigational and informational queries are weaker.

  • Beyond page 1, the correlation drops sharply and can even reverse in lower page 2 positions—likely due to small sample sizes and SERP variability.

  • Answering PAA questions alone isn’t enough to rank well; technical quality, external signals, and user experience still matter.

  • Covering a wide range of related questions can make content semantically richer, which may support ranking potential.

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Mark Williams-Cook (holding Snoop the dog) and Jack Chambers-Ward standing together, smiling. Jack is wearing an Opeth t-shirt. They are a cool Scandinavian metal band, apparently.