SEO is Turning into a Questions and Answers Game

I was reading an article from my buddy the other day and he had an interesting trend.

14.1% of all searches on Google are in the form of a question.

Here’s the breakdown within the United States:

  • How – 8.07%
  • What – 3.4%
  • Where – .88%
  • Why – .82%
  • Who – .6%
  • Which – .33%

Since Ubersuggest has over a billion keywords and already has a questions feature, I figured it would be interesting to see how it would look globally. As a heads up, it was a little tricky for some languages because people don’t often begin their questions with words like “how.”

None-the-less we were able to gather some interesting stats as we have data going back to 2017.

Global question and answer searches

Here’s what the question searches looked like in 2017.

What do you notice when looking at the data?

Generally, the overall percentage of question-based search queries has gone up. In 2017 it was 13.41% and it went up to 14.52% in 2020.

The big change though was “how” related keywords went up consistently each year. From 7.68% in 2017 to 8.61% in 2020.

My guess is because more of the world’s population has been getting access to the Internet due to the mass adaption of mobile devices more of them are interested in learning solutions to their problems. Hence the increase in searches of “how” related terms.

Questions are easier to rank for

Despite the fact that questions account for 14.52 percent of global searches, there is something worth noting. They’re a lot simpler to rate with. A domain authority of 58 is required to rank in Google’s top ten for a two-word keyword, but only a domain authority of 39 is required to rank for a question-related phrase.

Now, if that doesn’t convince you to start creating questions related content, this should…

Blogs with 100,000 visitors create question-related content

We did an analysis of blogs that have over 100,000 monthly SEO visitors. When we looked at their top 100 pages, here’s what portion of their traffic came from questions.It’s a key ingredient to having a popular blog. Plus you don’t need as many links, hence you don’t need as high as a domain authority to rank.

If you aren’t going after question-related terms, you should consider doing so. And here’s how I would do it if I was you.

Head over to Ubersuggest and type in one of the main keywords related to your site. You don’t have to rank for that term, instead, you are using it for ideas.

One of my main keywords related to my blog is “digital marketing”.

These keywords aren’t as well-known as head phrases, but there are plenty of them to work with. All you have to do now is keep adding keywords to Ubersuggest and looking at the “question”-related suggestions. If you build content on hundreds of them over time, you’ll find that traffic begins to increase.

It’s not as competitive, new sites can easily rank for question based content.According to Ubersuggest, it gets roughly 141 million visits a month from SEO. That’s a lot of traffic from creating question-related content.

Conclusion
You can start creating question-related content if you haven’t already.

It accounts for a significant portion of my traffic, and it’s a tactic that my ad agency employs for all of our clients.

The more specific you are with your material, the better off you will be.

So, what do you have to lose? Start typing in some keywords and see what common question-based content you can find.

SEO is Turning into a Questions and Answers Game

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