Study: How to eliminate a negative “People also ask” result

It can be difficult to manage your online reputation. It is important to keep up with Google’s constantly changing algorithms and rich results.

This Google SERP feature, also known as the PAA, plays an important role in a brand’s online reputation. The PAA questions and answers can influence a potential client’s initial impressions of your company.

My team and I have been working together to develop and test new methods for influencing the PAA snippet over the past year. Recently, we were able to help a client in educational services who was struggling with negative . People often ask questions about their products.

We experimented with SEO techniques and ORM to capture the negative PAA. Google pulled a positive answer from our client’s FAQ page and we were able to capture it.

This article contains findings that may help brands with negative PAA results.

Let’s first look at how Google’s People also ask questions can impact your online reputation.

What is Google’s People also question

Many people also ask This dynamic feature in Google search results provides additional information about the user’s original query.

These Q&A-style questions typically present 2-4 additional questions. Clicking on the answer snippet will bring up the URL of the website from which Google obtained it.

Google will typically highlight the most important information in a snippet with bold text as shown above.

Although Google hasn’t made it clear which factors are used for the PAA algorithm, we believe they are similar to the search ranking elements. These include relevancy, freshness and authority.

Can People also ask about my reputation?

Absolutely.

The PAA ranks in the top 2-5 results of Google’s SERPs on Page 1. This means that it is likely that someone searching for your company will find it.

Negative PAAs can ruin your online reputation, even if you have a fantastic website with other positive, high-ranking content.

Frontier Airlines is one example. The Page 1 results for search results show positive sentiment and include their website and social pages. Their PAA however tells a completely different story.

Users researching an airline might be concerned about their trustworthiness, ratings, and frequency of cancellations. This could prompt them to question whether they are making the right choice.

These provocative questions are more likely to grab the user’s attention. They will be curious and look for the answers.

Let’s take a look at “How is Frontier Airlines Rated?”

Not having 2.5- or 2-star ratings is bad. These numbers can lead to the user questioning the airline’s safety and quality.

Frontier may be able to convince users that even though other review sites have higher ratings than Frontier, they still might doubt Frontier.

What can I do to get rid of a negative PAA?

Negative PAA results can be corrected with many SEO and ORM strategies.

The current strategy is to capture the negative PAA result, optimize a piece owned content for Google to pull the answer from, then replace it with a positive-toned alternative.

These are the steps that we took to assist our client with their negative PAA results.

Problem

Due to a negative PAA appearing just below their website every time they searched their main keyword, our client had trouble with their online reputation.

Although the PAA question was inherently positive, it did not have any negative implications. Google pulled the answer out of a negative blog post about the client’s product.

This could have a negative impact on our client’s business as customers who see the negative PAA might abandon our client’s products or other services.

The approach

Our first ORM strategy was to promote the positive PAAs and push out the negative PAA.

This was temporary. We saw the negative PAA return with Google’s dynamic algorithm.

Realizing the PAA was here for the taking, we decided to attempt to capture it and replace the negative answer by a positive link to the website of our client.

Content evaluation

First, we need to determine if the content that Google will use to answer our question already exists. If it doesn’t, we will need to create the content piece and decide where and when it should be published.

We’ll check the page to see if the content is being pulled in as the PAA Answer.

Our client had an FAQ page already on their website that we could use to help them. The structure of the FAQ page was consistent with the PAA questions and answers format.

Next, we will examine the page content to determine if optimizations are necessary. We’ve found that many PAA answers match the PAA question’s wording.

Take this example as an example

As you can see, the answer to the question “Ice cream was invented in China“, follows the same structure and structure as ” When was the first ice cream invented?”

Two key elements are required:

• The PAA requests a location (“where”), and the answer is directly provided (“China”).
• Both the question as well as the answer both use the keywords “ice cream” or “invented” in the same order.

These points should be kept in mind as you write your content. Googlebot may be able to crawl your page and see the relationship between page content, relevant PAAs, and it could help them.

Evaluation of page format and schema

After determining that the target page content should correspond to the target PAA, our team audited the FAQ page of our client and found discrepancies in the wording of the PAA questions and the FAQ page.

The target PAA question was “When was [product] invention?” We changed the title of the FAQ section’s target Q&A section to reflect the PAA question text.

Google was able to better understand the structure of FAQ pages by ensuring that the title used H3 text instead of plain text.

We then updated the answer text’s first sentence to read “[Product] was invented 2011 …”.”

This perfectly reflected our target PAA question, giving us a better chance of getting it captured with our content.

We updated the FAQ page text and wanted to assess the code of the page to see if there were any previous schemas that needed updating.

We recommend that you implement FAQPage type in your code to create an FAQ page. Also, ensure that the text in your code matches the text on the page.

This helps to avoid confusion for crawlers, and emphasizes the reliability and quality content on your site.

Our client had already implemented the schema type so we only needed to change the schema text to match it.

Promotion strategies and engagement

Finally, we targeted the FAQ page of our client with ORM tactics. This included improvements in click-through rates (CTR), linkbuilding, and social sharing. Our goal was to send signals and demonstrate to Google that users are interested and find the page valuable.

You should consider the monthly search volume of your query (MSV) as well as the CTR of the target URL when evaluating CTR improvements for FAQ pages.

Google will not allow you to rank higher in the SERPs if your monthly CTR and MSV numbers are different.

Tools such as Ahrefs or Google Keyword Planner can help you find CTR and MSV data.

Google values quality over quantity when it comes to backlink building . Work with other sites and publishers in the same industry as the client to create content that mentions them, using the target keywords as anchor text.

We found 8 publishers that focused on parenting and education topics for our client. We gave them the exact anchor text and the URLs that we wanted them to use.

We chose to target URLs the FAQ page as well as the information page about the client’s product that was mentioned in the PAA.

You can use many social sharing strategies to increase your target page’s engagement.

You can ask any influencers to share the FAQ page with your company.

Encourage your friends, family, and followers to post on social media.

This tactic should be avoided. This tactic will make you appear to be “buying” shares. Here, we want genuine engagement!

You can also encourage your social media followers, who may have access to the target URLs’ comment section or other interactive features, to interact with the page.

To increase the engagement on their FAQ pages, we used several social media strategies for our client.

These are the results

After these SEO and ORM strategies were implemented, the PAA question was updated to get its answer from the FAQ page of our client.

The PAA question-answer structure remains relatively consistent. To ensure that the FAQ page is a permanent part of the PAA, we are constantly working to improve it.

Search Engine land – The first post Case Study: How to Get Rid of a Negative ‘People Also Ask’ result appeared on Search Engine.