The ‘People Also Ask’ SEO Hack That Builds Authority & Drives Sales

A lot of marketers still don't know the people also ask SEO trick, but it is so effective for building topical authority in your niche, letting you funnel that authority to SEO pages with more commercial value, just getting a lot of easy SEO traffic. Who doesn't like that? And it gives you an extra way to move people down into your marketing funnel. Newsletters, lead magnets, various call to actions. All right, so this is the people also ask trick. You might have heard me talk about it many episodes ago. We We first talked about it this with Mr. David Quaid. Episode 902, the five-minute SEO hack, turn people also ask into instant topical authority. This is how you do it. Start by gathering people also ask questions. You probably seen these people also ask blocks on Google search. You want to get these questions. Mark Williams Cook came on my podcast, a really well-known SEO. He created a tool called alsoasked.com, and it gives you people also ask questions in your niche straight from Google search results. So, you're not guessing people also ask questions, which a lot of other similar tools do. You literally are getting the people also ask questions straight from Google search. And his tool, alsoasked, it gives you a tree of people also ask questions that you can click into, and then you can get more related people also ask questions. And so, you just copy all the questions that are relevant to you and start with 10 to 12 of these questions. That's it. Don't start with more because you don't want to extend your SEO too far or too fast, especially if you're a newer site. Google hates it when you don't have a lot of authority and you just blow your SEO up really, really, really fast. There's a lot of sites get hit that way. Go slow, start with 10 to 12 of these questions. Now, go to Perplexity and use the prompt, give all the questions and use the prompt, write around 120-word plain text answers for each question returned inside a single code block with no citations. Perplexity will give you all the answers, just 120 words. Edit for your brand voice, edit for accuracy, remove m-dashes and other AI giveaways like buzzwords. Try to actually make it sound good, and then you create a subfolder for the questions. So, if your topic was 3D printing, and all of your people also ask questions were within 3D printing, you would do a subfolder like /3d-printing-faq. And this subfolder will be linked to in your footer under a resources section in the footer, and the anchor text will just be 3D printing FAQ. You know, really, really straightforward. So, you go into this 3D printing FAQ hub page, and this has all of your questions. You click on each one, and it doesn't open right there in the hub page, it opens on its own new page. So, your URL structure would look something like /3d-printing-faq / and then the question, then the slug, the URL slug, which is your frequently asked question. You should style the hub page. Before I get into the frequently asked questions page, you should style your hub page. Try to avoid it looking like a basic list of hyperlinks on a white background. Instead, style it, organize it with H2 headings, and then try to have a nice template for the individual question pages. And the H1 for the individual question pages is the question, and then right after you paste the answer that you got from Perplexity, which you cleaned up with your own voice and accuracy and removed AI giveaways. And that's it. That's the the start of the trick, and then you start ranking. If you're a newer site and you don't have a lot of authority, so you might not get crawled, you can literally just take this subfolder, this FAQ subfolder, and submit it to Google Search Console. That way Google will find all of the pages within it. And then, the thing about these people also ask questions is a lot of people don't create content specifically for them that is optimized for these questions. So, I I mentioned that you have the question in the URL slug and in the H1, but it it's also in the page title. You could put it at the beginning of the first sentence as well of the answer. That's not really necessary because these questions are just so easy, but you could do that, too. But because these questions are so easy, a bunch of them will start ranking, and this is where things get really fun because now you can take the ones that are ranking and invest in them further, and you can build them out. So, you're already getting some organic traffic to these pages, you add in relevant sections. These relevant sections allow the pages to rank for even more keywords and bring even more relevant organic traffic. You can add in call to actions, lead magnets, not super intrusive pop-ups in order to get people into your funnel. You can interlink to relevant bottom of funnel SEO landing pages, which you want to rank higher. And bottom of funnel SEO landing pages, these are targeting bottom of funnel keywords, which have purchase intent. So, these are pages that will bring you customers, that will bring you users, that will bring you warm leads calling you up. And you can use these people also ask pages that are ranking because if a page is ranking, if a page is ranking and people are not pogo sticking on that page, which means that they are not going back to the search results to click into other pages, they're satisfied with your page. When this happens, a page that is ranking with these satisfied clicks generates its own authority. A lot of people don't know that, and you can take this authority and channel it with an internal link into your pages that have more commercial value. And these are pages, again, that specifically target searchers who are looking for a brand to convert with. They just don't know the brand. And these pages have tremendous conversion rates because, again, searchers are literally looking to convert. So, the example keywords could be like voice note recorder for dentists, or handmade artisan ceramic mugs, or emergency laundry and repair Boston. And you pass authority from your people also ask pages to these commercial SEO pages, making them better able to rank for their target high-intent keywords. So, with not a lot of work, you've just made your more lucrative SEO pages rank higher, gotten people into your funnel for free, and increased the topical authority of your website, making it easier in general to rank in your niche. Come on. I love this trick so much, and there's one more thing that you can do, which is really cool. This was talked about on episode 1013 of this podcast, the first rule of internal linking that most SEOs ignore. Each of your people also ask pages, like I said, is generating its own authority, and you pass that authority with internal links. But what you do is once you have a page that you internal link to, once its rankings are stabilized, as in there's not a lot of fluctuating with its rankings, the page isn't ranking up and down for its target keyword, it's just staying at a very high ranking, you actually don't need to keep linking to it with a ton of different ranking pages. As long as it is not an orphan page, you can literally take one of these people also ask pages and link it to another page that you want to do better. And then, hopefully that page is good and it has a good click-through rate in the search engine results pages, it doesn't have a lot of pogo sticking. And if that's the case, you just created all these different assets that are generating their own authority because they are ranking well and getting satisfied clicks, and then you can take them and you can keep linking to more pages. I wrote a newsletter yesterday likening this to colonies. Each SEO page that is ranking with satisfied clicks becomes a colony with which to expand from. It's like a real-time strategy game or the board game Risk, if you ever played that. Now, the other thing is while you're doing all of this, you should still be putting time into building actual backlinks. If you just keep doing this strategy, you're going to hit a wall with how much self-authority you can generate, so you still want to go after backlinks. And having backlinks just makes your SEO, especially backlinks that are resulting in referral traffic, it makes your SEO look a lot more natural. In SEO, a lot of people talk about having a natural backlink profile, but really, you want a natural authority profile. Your own ranking pages generate authority, the backlinks you get also generate authority. And if you have too many ranking pages, especially way too fast, without your backlinks scaling, then you could get hit by Google. So, simultaneously build backlinks. But this people also ask trick is so cool. Again, you're increasing your topical authority, funneling that authority into pages that have commercial value, getting more SEO traffic, it's easy, moving people down into your marketing funnel. I love it. I hope you will try it, and that is everything that I've got for you on this episode of the show. This is episode 1021 of the Emerald Show. If you want to get my full SEO playbook, the thing on my shirt, that is compactkeywords.com. I spent a year making a course showing how to do my method of purchase intent SEO, making these bottom of funnel SEO landing pages, finding bottom of funnel keywords, structuring your site for these pages, doing link building, doing a site audit. The course is getting incredible testimonials. I keep adding new ones to the landing page. You're going to love it. If you haven't checked it out, again, that is at If you watched this episode on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.