The 5-Minute SEO Hack: Turn ‘People Also Ask’ Into Instant Topical Authority

0:00David Quaid, welcome back to the show. We were we were debating right before recording this. We're gonna jump into this is part of a uh when I bring back previous guests to talk about some cool SEO things for a little bit amount of time and it gives you some awesome SEO things to think about and to do. David,

0:19thanks again. Thanks so much for having me. Um, so yeah, I wanted to share a quick um, you know, time-saving hack, topical authority building hack. Uh, you hear a lot about people talking about keyword research, how difficult it is, especially if you don't have expensive tools to do it. Uh, people talk about how do I do FAQ content for example to or glossery content to boost my topical authority and I thought like here's a fiveinut hack that is going to change the way you do it forever. So, and it's not going to cost you anything and you don't need any specialized tools. So, first thing I'm going to share screen

0:57going to jump over to my favorite search engine. Um, and I'm going to obviously I Google my own name all the time. It's terrible, but I did get a I did get a knowledge panel last night. So, I'm really excited about that and it's thanks to your show. Well, thank Yeah, I thank you. Well, can you actually can you talk about that cuz

1:20it's very interesting. I can I got a knowledge panel. So, if you search for my name and you don't get Dennis Quaid, um you have to put SEO with it. Oh, well, it's gone now. But you she you could share the screenshot that you shared on on X. I can. Especially when these things show up,

1:46they come and go. They do and then they get more stable. But here, this is what it looks like. Yeah. And so I had to fill in I had to fill in a form. I had to take a selfie with uh my ID and I had to also take a screenshot of my LinkedIn and X page with my photograph

2:11in it. Why did you get this knowledge this knowledge panel? I so a couple of things. Um the number of people searching for me went up. Uh and I can see that cuz like for a start I have my own branded domain. So if you're doing SEO or anything and you don't have your own branded domain, are

2:33you even doing SEO? You have to have like if you're anybody, right, you have to have your own branded domain. Um, so the second thing is you need to have multiple pages and you probably want to add schema. So, uh, in some of these pages, I do actually have schema as to who I am. And then you also want to make sure people are like googling things about you. And if they are uh eventually Google will pop up a knowledge panel and then it lets you claim the knowledge panel and then when you claim the knowledge panel you have to have your ID and then that lets you

3:22what's really interesting is you said baby basically you came on the show you had the most watched guest episode of this podcast. Thanks again to everybody who watched that and uh then a lot of people started googling you. And then a lot of people started googling me and it and it went like really up. So it was

3:42like it went into like the thousands. And so Google is basically like this entity is something. Yes. And I don't know if it's like it has to go on for like 3 weeks, 6 weeks, 12 months or if it has to reach a critical mass uh or if it's a specific type of schema. So, I don't know if it's the persona schema, but um we did add a persona

4:12schema on Friday. You know what? Oh. Oh, that's interesting. That's an interesting data point. What made you What caused you to do that? So, this was before this was before you got the knowledge panel. Yes. What made me do it? Um I was experimenting. Cool. Always be experimenting. So you added the persona schema as well as the So I added I I I had a page I had a service schema, I had a company schema and I added a persona schema or something like that. One one of the two one of Well, as as much as I would like to believe that the knowledge panel was due

4:50to this show, how do we know it wasn't just it wasn't just due to you adding the the schema? Definitely not. Um lots and lots of people have schema and have no knowledge panel. Um, uh, I've had schema about me on certain pages for a very long time. Uh, you only become a a knowledge entity when people search for you. It's like the same. You only you can only impact the suggested search or the people also ask by having people search. It's one of the most difficult things to do because you actually have to encourage multiple people with multiple IPs to search for something over a sustained uh period of

5:26time. And and how does um how does Google come to associate your ex and your LinkedIn? Um or what do you believe? So I think one of the pages that all of my pages are cross linked and then um it's this specific page that was actually is so if if you go back and look at the X screen, you can see it's this particular page and so this particular page links to both. And this

5:57is the page with the schema. Hey, look, it's me. You can look at schema checker. Go into here, paste the page, run the test, and there's the schema. So, we added a profile page, a person, a local business, and a web page, which is the default. Mhm. And yeah. Uh, so I you obviously have to I think you have to have the search is the most important and then the schema helps it. But they didn't email me. They didn't. So I don't think it was that. I didn't get an email about it. Um although although although although it did have my email when I was doing the validation

6:44test and I think it got it from like here. That's very interesting. Okay. So, how do how do how did do the people also ask hack? Right. So, let give me a topic. Do you want to do whiskey? Let's do whiskey. I have I have some whiskey in my Tumblr. We were talking about that before we

7:03started recording. So, do a search and then come straight down to the people also ask and then pick pick the most. Increase the the text size, please. Of course. Zoom it in. So, let's let's pick the whiskies that you think are most relevant or the the questions you like, right? Like get a good screen like that, right? Or or however many you want and take your favorite take your favorite screen grabbing software, get a screenshot, go to your favorite Googlebased uh LLM tool. Perplexity is mine. paste it and then create a prompt something like this using my website or whatever as a base I don't know how I don't know how effective this

7:56is as a base write a 120word answer for each question what's amazing when you take screenshots or even like partial screen grabs uh the LLMs know what it is like if you take it like a partial screen grab of like say queries in search console, it'll know search console because there's such pattern recognition machine.

8:20Um, so write 120 word question. Can you zoom in again by the way? Yep. Cuz I think it might be hard for people to to see. And then here's a pro tip, right? Give the answer as plain text in a code snippet and then this way you won't get all of the HTML formatting. So what it'll do is it'll write the

8:43answers for you as right. This method of marketing is so effective I had to make sure it wasn't against Google's rules before I kept doing it. It's a form of SEO I call compact keywords. Whereas most SEO focuses on putting up articles to answer questions how, what, when. Compact keywords focuses on putting up dozens of pages that sell to searchers who are actually looking to buy. These pages rank on Google and convert so much better than normal that when I discovered this years ago, I couldn't believe this was allowed. It's less work, too. The average compact keywords page is only 415 words. Compact Keywords is a 13-hour

9:22deep course on getting sales with SEO. A customer recently said, "Each lesson is dense with information. You're giving years worth of experience boiled down into 15 to 30 minute lessons with no filler or fluff. I feel like I'm gaining a new superpower. Compact Keywords is about setting up an SEO funnel that brings you sales for years and years and years. It works with AI. It's less work than traditional SEO and it makes way more money. You can get it now at

9:52compactkeywords.com. Back to the podcast. And then when it eventually finishes kicking all of it out, uh, when you copy and paste this, it'll be really easy to, um, edit. Now, I don't know why it's stuck these in. Um, I'm going to stop it and go back and edit this and say, um, remove citations.

10:16That might stop it from doing that. That's the first time I've seen it do it in an exercise like this. But this is a massive timesaver, right? like in 10 minutes you could go from having zero content. Look at this. It's writing a question um for all of what you would you would make each of

10:37these in H2. I would do that or if I'm if I'm developing my topical authority, I wouldn't even bother putting them on the same page. I would build these out as an individual FAQ and I would dispense with schema. What would the Yeah, go on. So, what I'm going to do is I would I I'll go to a doc, right? And I'll Oh, explain what you mean you would dispense

11:04with schema. I So, there's a couple of things about ranking that I think people don't understand and that's why I find the schema thing so funny, right? Is schema doesn't make you rank. uh for schema to make you rank a a an algorithm whatever you believe is has an algorithm would have to take all of the content find the best content and then kick out all the content without schema that makes no sense right in in other words if schema is going to help you rank it would have to ignore all of the content with sche without schema and that just isn't true because content with without schema ranks all

11:43the time so what I would say is for each of these is make them a page so that the page title is and the document name is the question. That gives you 100% relevancy. Now, some people will say, well, you only need a partial match. That's coming from people having different observations and their website that they're developing their observations experience from is growing in topical authority and external authority. The less authority you have, the greater the relevance to the search phrase, the greater your authority is used. It's like same as like ad rank, right? Like it's ad quality score times by dollar bid. So you can make your your

12:24your page more relevant to the topic, you will rank higher. That's why that's how SEOs first reverse engineered how important the page title is or how important the slug is or that's the document name because not all documents that Google indexes are HTML. It supports 57 types and there's only a handful that support a metad description or a page title or a H1. Um, you know, BAS files, image files do not have page titles. They don't have metadescriptions. So these things cannot be uh critical to SEO. They can be suggestive and helpful and increase relevance if you create an FAQ on its own page. So there's two ways of doing

13:09it. Developers prefer to do it as an accordion. People that have lots of authority and want to increase clickthrough rate do it as an accordion. Everyone else should do it as its own page. And if you do it as own page, you don't use schema. You only use schema to help like Google separate where the question ends and answers. schema does nothing to the question. It doesn't make it more uh trustworthy. It doesn't add any authority to it. It just helps text scrapers scrape it out. Uh that's why I find it so funny. And if you put this if you do this without schema, you you'll

13:42you're you're definitely going to rank. If you if you put this in an accordion and you don't rank, it's because you don't have the topical authority to do so. And that's all it is. Uh, so how are you going to um structure the slugs for each of these? Um, absolutely. The type the the

14:00question is the slug. Mhm. And are you going to use what is are you going to use a subfolder like FAQ or whiskey questions? Absolutely. Would you would you call it something would you put would you try to actually have the topic in the subfolder or would you just do a generic FAQ? um or it depends on the brand name and what

14:24the brand is about. It really depends on your topic and if you're and how expansive your web is. Uh I don't think that the parent folder has much impact on the sug. Um, but if you're going to develop lots of other topics and FAQs, then I would if you're going to do if you mean like uh well, what if you're going to do lots of other FAQs in the same niche? So, you're going to do like one like this is whiskey, right? You're going to do one

14:56that's tequila and one that's vodka. Then I'm definitely going to have different FAQ parent folders. Mhm. Absolutely. So, what would it read like what I don't know? I guess it depends on your brand. Whiskey questions, whiskey FAQs, it whiskey answers. It could be whiskey tasting FAQs. It could be Mhm. It depends. Yeah, this is cool.

15:20Thank you. Thank you for showing that. All right, that's all. That's this is uh Yeah, we're doing we're doing a bunch of like quick little fun tips and we're going to have a lot more of these with more guests from the past and new guests. So, thanks again to David. David is coming back tomorrow with Gagen Gotra and Harprit Singh for a mega for a mega holiday episode. That's going to be a ton of fun. But everybody who who has watched this one and and listened to this one, this is episode 92 of the Edward Show. 92 days in a row doing this crazy podcast. Thank you. Thank you

15:59again to David for coming on. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for listening. I will talk to you again tomorrow.