How to Research and Optimise for Questions to Increase Engagement on Your Dental Practice Website
If you’re not optimising your content for questions, you’re missing out on opportunities to engage customers and drive more traffic to your site.
Questions are valuable for many reasons:
Types of Questions and How to Categorise Them
- 1High-intent questions, such as asking how to buy.
- 2Navigational questions about site navigation.
- 3Competitive research questions, such as brand comparisons.
- 4Reputation questions, such as concern your company culture.
Regarding basic and how-to questions, the query may only have the intent of searching for information. That said, there’s always a possibility that this question is searched with the intent to purchase.
How to Discover Questions with Tools
“People Also Ask” Tool
The “People Also Ask” tool from Google contains related questions to a given query. While not a lot of information is available on how Google generates these, we can assume that these questions would only be shown if there are enough queries to justify them.
More space is taken up in the search engine results by the “People Also Ask” tool, and showing up in more search engine results with one query is a valuable aspect of organic search visibility.
The “People Also Ask” tool is important for content marketing for two reasons:
- It offers insight into the searches of the target audience.
- It boosts organic search visibility.
Google Search Engine Results Page
Search results provide a lot of information about terms and concepts from search engine results pages, if you analyse them properly. A Text Optimiser tool will extract terms and concepts from the search engine results pages and analyses them to provide a list of questions to include in content. This tool will expand on the knowledge you gain from the “People Also Ask” tool.
Google Suggest
Google Suggest is a search-based tool that’s designed for content marketers. Google autocompletes a query based on the most popular searches from other users. With this in mind, we can assume that Google Suggest results have a significant search volume or demand to end up in the suggested index.
The challenge with Google Suggest is deciding how to start the question to see it completed. First, you type your query in and hit search, then you pull your cursor back to the beginning of the query. If you add “how,” Google will suggest other popular searches.
You can take this a step further by using Serpstat, which is a keyword research tool that gives you niche questions according to your core question. You can also sort the results by the original question and filter questions by the most popular term to organise your results.
Quora
Quora is arguably one of the largest sources of questions online. Unlike some other discussion boards, however, Quora requires users to post discussions in a question form, so it only offers questions.
Quora’s search can be challenging, due to the complex architecture of topics, and it doesn’t show you the most popular questions. The algorithm works on personalization, timeliness, activity and some other factors.
With this in mind, the Buzzsumo Question Analyzer is useful to organise your Quora results. It aggregates results from Quora and other discussion boards to analyse your query and generate results, giving you in-depth insight into what searchers are looking for.
Though not many content marketers use Twitter for this purpose, it’s an incredible source of content inspiration. Twitter’s question search allows you to see what questions users ask when discussing your brand or product with the following search:
Type [brandname ?] (be sure to include a space) into the search box and you’ll see any questions related to your brand, product or topic.
This can also be used to monitor your competitors and get an idea of what your prospective customers are searching for from them, so you can position yourself to solve customers’ problems better.
How to Include Questions in Your Content
Questions provide a virtually limitless source of content marketing opportunities. Here’s how you can use questions to inform your content:
- Create a frequently asked questions section that addresses the basic questions that come up in queries often.
- Develop and optimise your existing content to address common questions.
- Add Q&A sections to your landing pages, which may also help you get a product page in Google.
- Develop new content to address a question that lacks satisfying answers.
The value of questions goes far beyond content, however. Question research should involve different departments in your company to maximise your results.
Basic Questions
Basic questions do well with content like glossaries or FAQ. The customer support and sales teams should use this information to adopt the same language or jargon as the customers. The CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) team should be involved as well, since basic questions could be transactional.
How-to Questions
How-to questions do well with content like FAQ and videos. Your CRO team should be involved, since these can lead to sales.
Branded Questions
Final Thoughts
Questions are incredibly useful for content marketing inspiration, but they can also provide insights into audience research, conversion optimization and product development. Optimising for questions also boosts your SEO and ensures that your copy is ready to earn you more organic search visibility.
Researching questions and optimising for them is a continuous process, however. Over time, you may discover new questions or new ways to find them, offering real-time knowledge that gives your business a competitive edge.