Improve Your Local Business Reach Online By Using Question Research
Researching question queries can help guide your SEO strategy and dominate Google’s featured snippets. These are ever-evolving positions and increasingly gaining importance as mobile and voice search grow in importance. With new technology and new ways of searching your optimization strategies must innovate.
Why Research and Optimize Questions?
By researching niche specific questions you can gain a better understanding and ultimately serve your target customer better. It can give a great deal of insight into your target consumers struggles and how to serve their needs better. Questions are easier to relate to than keywords, so building content around questions is much easier than around a specific keyword. Questions are naturally more inspiring which makes it a perfect content creation source.
Niche questions can also help you optimize for featured snippets and voice search opportunities. As we know, most queries triggering featured snippets are questions. Optimizing for these questions can lead to an increase in traffic, and an increase your brand awareness.
By researching and answering niche questions you also streamline your customer support. It helps you create a unified resource of all relevant questions. This makes your customer support much more productive. It also makes training and outsourcing easier. The ultimate goal is to turn your website into a resource so that your customer is more likely to find their answers there, rather than going around the forums to ask questions.
How to Research Niche and Local Questions
- Location-based questions: Often these are generic questions around your location that could help your business be discovered even when your target customer isn’t necessarily interested in your product or service yet. These questions build local brand familiarity and lead, and sometimes direct conversations.
- Business-based questions: These are actual questions your current and/or future customers are asking about your business and your product or service.
- Competitor-based questions: These are questions people are asking about your competition. These are useful for many purposes from gaining an advantage (learning how to build a better product) to learning to avoid your comeptitors’ mistakes.
How to Optimize Your Local Business Site for Questions
Now that you’ve figured out what questions to optimize for, what should you do?
Step 1: Get organized
First, begin by creating an actionable content roadmap creating clusters of different topics. When organizing questions you should separate them according to search intent (informational, commercial, navigational, etc), content type, seasonality, etc.
Step 2: Optimize content for questions
Once you’ve created your content plan you can begin creating and optimizing your content. Featured snippets and voice search are both so important and you should ensure your content is optimized for both. The best way to ensure your page appears in both it to create a clear content structure.
- H2 subhead: Parent question #1
- Followed by the concise on-point answer…
- H3 “subtopic” question #1
- Followed by the concise on-point answer…
- H3 “subtopic” question #2
- Followed by the concise on-point answer…
- H2 subhead: Parent question #2
- etc.
Using a structure like this helps Google to quickly locate the answer and feature it as a snippet. Another tactice is to evaluate the best possible format to satisfy each question the best. Actually attempting to answer the question with the best possible answer will go a long way.
Step 3: Implement Schema Markup
Using schema.org markup is easier than you may think (there are a variety of advanced plugins that can handle that for you, and for larger brands, scalable solutions like Schema App are perfect) and even while it may not improve your rankings, it won’t definitely hurt.
Is your local business website optimized for questions? Comment below with any tips and questions.