SEO Hidden Gem: How do you find out which questions your site ranks for?

The following ideas are taken from the article entitled How to Use Regex in Google Search Console — refer to the article for the regex format:

• Branded Search Filters — your company name, for example.
• Filter Product Model Names — ABC123, for example.
• Filter URLs by File Extension — PDF files, for example.

Developing content to answer specific and targeted questions so as to interact with that 8% of search traffic in Google and hopefully boost traffic and improve SEO.

According to the WebFX article entitled “3 Types of Search Queries and How to Target Them“, Google segments queries into three types:

1. Navigational — for example, the user needs to visit specific website
2. Transactional — including brand-focused searches, generic searches, and vertical searches
3. Informational — for example, the user needs to answer a question

Navigational queries cannot be optimized however transactional queries and informational queries can be optimized.

Yes: One example is under Behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages -> Right-hand side search box select Advanced and choose “Matching Regexp“.

In this example we have an exact text matching expression which will show us question optimized pages that contains “how” in the URL.

Another example can be found under Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Channels -> Advanced Filter.

Yes: 

In the previous question we listed several websites that can be used to interact with a large audience for the purposes of engineering the development of a question keyword optimized article. 

The idea is to infer how important a question may be to a larger audience such that you’re not guessing when developing content. StackOverflow, for instance, is important to software developers so if you were, for example, selling antique car parts, StackOverflow is likely going to be of no value when conducting research.

A simple starting point could be finding which part is most frequently changed on a specific automobile and then building a question around that subject — something like “How to replace the carburetor on a 57 Chevy Bel Air” — for this you would need your own set of reference websites and other sources by which to engineer your content.

Question-optimized keywords can increase organic traffic and boost SEO by targeting that ~8% of Google search traffic that is simply looking to have a question answered. Keep in mind that while ~8% may sound like a low number, on a per-day basis this equates to something in the neighborhood of ~ 280,000,000 search queries.

The content engineer should aim to deliver high quality and targeted content that answers a very specific question in detail.

Requires further research.

This requires that you research this answer for yourself.

For example, an article which I intend to write at some point will be entitled something very close to:

“How to install the StackPath Content Delivery Network (CDN) in WordPress using the W3 Total Cache plugin.“

List posts, or “listicles”, are an ideal format for question optimized keyword posts because they are easy to skim and help the reader find the information they need quickly.

Requires further research.

You use LinkedIn Groups, Facebook Groups, Quora, and StackOverflow to conduct research on what might be a good topic for an article that answers a specific, complex question. If you’re not in technology strike StackOverflow and use other sites which are appropriate for your industry.

What other tools can we use when researching keyword-optimized question ideas?

See also: Google Keyword Planner as well as [11] — specifically the section entitled “3- Long Answer Questions (LAQ)”.

We should make use of all tools available so yes, we can and should use long-tail keywords (LTKs) too as question optimized query articles should perform well if they’re very specific and we can achieve this specificity in a number of ways but one which stands out is to use LTK’s.

Read [8, 9, 10, and 11]