What is People Also Ask?

In February of 2018, if you searched through a search engine and then clicked your back button in your browser window, more SERPs appeared that you hadn’t seen with your original search. This is referred to as “People Also Ask.”

People Also Ask is a Google rich snippet feature that provides users with additional information they may be looking for from their initial query. An example of this is searching for “how to start a garden.” The People Also Ask results that appear are questions that follow your original search. Some include “what month should you start a garden?” “is it expensive to start a garden?” and “what’s the easiest vegetable to grow?” All of these questions relate to beginner queries on starting a garden.

How do I rank for People Also Ask?

You found this page because you were wondering what People Also Ask is. Next, you will likely want to understand how to rank for People Also Ask snippets. By adding the question, “how do I rank for People Also Ask?” to this page, we are optimizing for People Also Ask.

Understanding the questions a user will ask after they’ve asked their initial question and creating content around those questions is exactly how to optimize for People Also Ask. Be sure that every question you write content for is fully answered in order to have the best opportunity at ranking.

You can also add Question schema or QAPage schema to your page in order to tell search engines your page is a question and answer page.

You can do research using Data Cube and Instant to understand what types of questions users are asking. You can also use these products to understand which related topics users are searching for and create your own questions around them.

Another way to understand what users are searching for is to do a search on your own. The questions that appear are the questions people are asking for. You can click through the People Also Ask results section and more questions related to the topic will appear. You can also find related questions at the bottom of the SERP. It is important to know People Also Ask results can appear at the beginning, middle or end of the results pages. If you don’t see it at the top, scroll down to find the section.