Answer
Dec 31, 2024 - 12:28 PM
This is always a bit hard to answer because it depends on the quality of your content, competitiveness of your content, and then the competitiveness of the products your selling and how your competition is doing supporting their users with helpful content related to that product....and then Google's dramatic changes in 2024 with both how results display and their core rankings systems...this is not a "simple" answer to answer this question...but we'll give it a shot. Even with Q&A...we've seen very notable shifts in Google and how they're ranking it and it's blown up specifically in Google's August Core Update and Google's December Core Update....see those core updates and their lift on Q&A (through Answerbase) with clear lifts after those releases here:
Also...the visibility of "Popular Products" in search results has taken over in 2024....so SERPS have been pretty volatile...but we'll try to address this question the best we can with the data we have now.
If you're looking for a VERY quick answer to this question, we can summarize the rest of this answer in this way:
We saw in 2024 that the content itself can be indexed and ranking anywhere from a couple weeks to several months depending on it's quality and competitiveness....and then we've seen the impact on the product page positions more of a "slow bubbling up" over a 3-12 month period depending on the site and it's competitiveness. As communicated above....you need to keep in mind that Google's ecommerce search results and it's core ranking systems have changed dramatically in 2024 so we'll look to update this as we have more data...but that's what we've seen from the data we have now.
When it comes to how content that you publish impacts the rankings of your product pages, there are several things that we need to break down here in order to approach this topic. First you need to publish quality Q&A content related to your highest priority products, once you publish that content Google needs to crawl/read/index that content and determines how helpful that content is related to the topic and satisfying real search demand/intent (and the intricacies of how Google does that and how long that takes to happen)....and then Google determines how that should impact any positioning of the pages that content is related to which is your product pages. So, there are a few things going on here that we're going to break down individually.....to draw the big picture.
We'll organize it in these steps.
1) Publishing Quality Content that Google Recognizes as Adding Value to the Internet
This is the core of everything, creating content that is actually helpful. Helpful doesn't mean long, helpful means does it satisfy the informational intent of people searching for information on the Internet and are you fulfilling it with something based off of your real experience and expertise (or that of your team). This is core to everything...and this is what Google is respecting. A good 3 sentence answer can outperform a thousand word blog post that your competitor spends thousands of dollars on.....if it satisfactorily satisfies search intent. This is what Google's 2024 core updates have been optimizing for, and this is what Google clearly communicated they will optimize towards in the future (highly recommend you click this link to review their video).....forever.....so this needs to be your focus. When you're reviewing/publishing/answering product Q&A.....what you need to do is put yourself into the mind of a customer visiting your product page and when you're considering publishing each Q&A you should be very confident that a customer is going to have a great experience (from their perspective) with that piece of content when they're looking for that information related to that product your selling. It's not about "keeping up with the Jones" from a content standpoint...it's not about copying your competitors...it's about understanding what information your actual (current) customers are looking for and satisfying that with your team's expertise and knowledge to satisfy the intent of the informational need.
2) Google's timeline for ranking that content in order to satisfy informational searches
This is one of these general SEO questions that can be frustrating about SEO....because at the end of the day it's up to Google, their analysis of your content and related pages, and their analysis of how you should rank against the other pages that they can prioritize for a query.
The consensus here and if you ask this question into Google on how quickly they work have new content impact your rankings.....they communicate in their AI overview that you may be looking at 3-6 months. See their response here which we'll note a couple things about it based on our experience:
The things we'd like to note about this based on our experience is the following:
Note on "Focus on long-term strategy"
As communicated in the "important points" above...."Building high-quality content consistently over time is crucial for sustainable ranking improvements". This is exactly what we mentioned in our first point in this answer....that "good content for SEO rankings"shouldn't be done with short term thinking. You should be looking to provide the best way you can to match your customer's demand for information with the expert within your organization who can share their expertise...and appropriately publish and distribute that information for indexing, effectively interlinking to relevant products related to that content. Answerbase automates that process.....but while "quick wins" are always nice to see...it should be a consistent and steady growth of content as you're fulfilling that information demand as fast as you can and you'll see results over time. As far as how much time we've seen...let's dig into that....
Note on "typically takes several weeks to a few months to significantly impact your search ranking"
This has been our experience as well. We've had some customers that have posted some great/insighful Q&A related to their products/services and we've seen that content ranking on the first page for target queries within about a week or two, it was very quick. On average though with our general observations....the content growth/ranking is a slow/steady grow. We'll go over some of these scenarios with what we've seen with the Q&A content....and then communicate what we've seen with how it impacts the positions of the other pages. The first step is to create quality Q&A content that is relevant to your audience and helpful.
See this example of a customer who had not been really paying attention to their Q&A content...where they weren't answering 90% of the questions that came in. Then....as soon as they started just going through and answering the questions well for their customers....their Q&A content (specifically) is springing to life. We communicated with them about their neglect in the fall and you can see as they started answering the questions you start to see an increase in impressions they start to take off.
As you can see the impressions/clicks go up pretty consistently with each other.
Note on "Highly competitive keywords take longer to rank for than less popular ones."
Here is another example of a customer using our solution where their Q&A content started ramping up in June/July....and you see a notable increase in impressions but they are in a MUCH more competitive space than the above...so you don't see the clicks following as clearly as the above example:
So...you can see the frequency/volume of the clicks is going up....but it's just not as drastic as the first example.
3) Timeline to Impact Google's Ranking of your Product and Category Pages
First....we want to make clear that there is a relationship between how your Q&A content is indexed and performs and how that impacts the rest of your site's product and category pages...and how they rank and perform. What was great about Google's August core ranking update is that the Q&A content exploded in performance on organic search....and through that very quick and clear rise you can see directly how the Q&A content impacts the rest of an ecommerce site's performance.
IMPORTANT NOTE: The below example is a seasonal businesses with their peaks in the summer and dips during the winter....so keep that in mind with all of these charts. You can see the overall lift by comparing dates year over year.
In this example.....see their core ecommerce site (product pages, category pages, etc.) but note that this chart DOES NOT cover the Q&A landing pages.....so you can see their overall site for pages that the Q&A is integrated into but not including the Q&A landing pages. You can see year over year in their peak months they had healthy growth to their site.
Now....look at what happened to their Q&A content and look at what happened in Google's 2024 August Update (started seeing lift in July 18th, 2024)....
In general, we did see a huge lift to Q&A content pages (we actually had to triple our cloud infrastructure given the new demand starting in July)....and the above example shows that lift. The most important thing about seeing that lift for the specific type of Q&A content is you can directly see how it impacts the rest of their site. See how the seasonal decline basically stopped declining as the Q&A content positions/traffic went up....see here:
In the last 28 days in Google Search Console....for that site the Q&A content is around 50% of of their overall traffic....which provides this lift to the rest of this site which are the pages they're really interested in. This is the connection between you publishing valuable content on your site and how that should help lift for the pages/searches that you're really interested in....which are people looking for the products that you sell that produces revenue.
That example above was an established Answerbase customer that has been answering questions on their site for years....so you can directly see the performance of the Q&A content and then how that is impacting their other pages like product and category pages. For new customers....you're just starting to build your Q&A knowledge base and that section of your site. We've see brand new sites they're using Answerbase's tool and AI-Enhanced product optimization tools, it can take 6-12 months to really start impacting the ranking of the product pages and the overall site's rankings...but we've seen it do both for the "Popular Products" tables as well as the overall domain position for target keywords.
As you post more and more great content Google is going to start respecting those pages and content more and more over time. Google's related content to products.....where let's say you have 90 questionable products on your site and 10 great products....how seriously is somebody going to look at your site? It's the same thing with content.....if you have 90% of your content that isn't original insights/information and adding value to the internet overall then Google and people don't take yoru site as seriously as others (again, regardless of how long the content is....Google and users don't care, they just want their questions answered). Not only that....but if you're publishing a bunch of copycat content with no original information insights, Google has communicated that it can even negatively impact your rankings (so beware of just trying to "compete" with competitor content without servicing your own customer's informational needs as the priority).
Content creation for SEO should be about fulfilling your customer's information demand with the best possible responses.....and SEO is an added benefit to effectively servicing your customers. Answerbase just makes that connection between the demand for information, the person within your organization who can fulfill it...and making that accessible to customers as efficient as possible both on your site and yes....through search engines as well. That grows your informational search traffic while also helping your overall rankings.
Also...the visibility of "Popular Products" in search results has taken over in 2024....so SERPS have been pretty volatile...but we'll try to address this question the best we can with the data we have now.
If you're looking for a VERY quick answer to this question, we can summarize the rest of this answer in this way:
We saw in 2024 that the content itself can be indexed and ranking anywhere from a couple weeks to several months depending on it's quality and competitiveness....and then we've seen the impact on the product page positions more of a "slow bubbling up" over a 3-12 month period depending on the site and it's competitiveness. As communicated above....you need to keep in mind that Google's ecommerce search results and it's core ranking systems have changed dramatically in 2024 so we'll look to update this as we have more data...but that's what we've seen from the data we have now.
When it comes to how content that you publish impacts the rankings of your product pages, there are several things that we need to break down here in order to approach this topic. First you need to publish quality Q&A content related to your highest priority products, once you publish that content Google needs to crawl/read/index that content and determines how helpful that content is related to the topic and satisfying real search demand/intent (and the intricacies of how Google does that and how long that takes to happen)....and then Google determines how that should impact any positioning of the pages that content is related to which is your product pages. So, there are a few things going on here that we're going to break down individually.....to draw the big picture.
We'll organize it in these steps.
- Publishing quality content that Google recognizes as being helpful to real searchers and adding value to the Internet as a whole
- Google's timeline for ranking that content in order to satisfy informational searches
- The timeline where that starts impacting Google's ranking of your product and category pages
1) Publishing Quality Content that Google Recognizes as Adding Value to the Internet
This is the core of everything, creating content that is actually helpful. Helpful doesn't mean long, helpful means does it satisfy the informational intent of people searching for information on the Internet and are you fulfilling it with something based off of your real experience and expertise (or that of your team). This is core to everything...and this is what Google is respecting. A good 3 sentence answer can outperform a thousand word blog post that your competitor spends thousands of dollars on.....if it satisfactorily satisfies search intent. This is what Google's 2024 core updates have been optimizing for, and this is what Google clearly communicated they will optimize towards in the future (highly recommend you click this link to review their video).....forever.....so this needs to be your focus. When you're reviewing/publishing/answering product Q&A.....what you need to do is put yourself into the mind of a customer visiting your product page and when you're considering publishing each Q&A you should be very confident that a customer is going to have a great experience (from their perspective) with that piece of content when they're looking for that information related to that product your selling. It's not about "keeping up with the Jones" from a content standpoint...it's not about copying your competitors...it's about understanding what information your actual (current) customers are looking for and satisfying that with your team's expertise and knowledge to satisfy the intent of the informational need.
2) Google's timeline for ranking that content in order to satisfy informational searches
This is one of these general SEO questions that can be frustrating about SEO....because at the end of the day it's up to Google, their analysis of your content and related pages, and their analysis of how you should rank against the other pages that they can prioritize for a query.
The consensus here and if you ask this question into Google on how quickly they work have new content impact your rankings.....they communicate in their AI overview that you may be looking at 3-6 months. See their response here which we'll note a couple things about it based on our experience:
The things we'd like to note about this based on our experience is the following:
Note on "Focus on long-term strategy"
As communicated in the "important points" above...."Building high-quality content consistently over time is crucial for sustainable ranking improvements". This is exactly what we mentioned in our first point in this answer....that "good content for SEO rankings"shouldn't be done with short term thinking. You should be looking to provide the best way you can to match your customer's demand for information with the expert within your organization who can share their expertise...and appropriately publish and distribute that information for indexing, effectively interlinking to relevant products related to that content. Answerbase automates that process.....but while "quick wins" are always nice to see...it should be a consistent and steady growth of content as you're fulfilling that information demand as fast as you can and you'll see results over time. As far as how much time we've seen...let's dig into that....
Note on "typically takes several weeks to a few months to significantly impact your search ranking"
This has been our experience as well. We've had some customers that have posted some great/insighful Q&A related to their products/services and we've seen that content ranking on the first page for target queries within about a week or two, it was very quick. On average though with our general observations....the content growth/ranking is a slow/steady grow. We'll go over some of these scenarios with what we've seen with the Q&A content....and then communicate what we've seen with how it impacts the positions of the other pages. The first step is to create quality Q&A content that is relevant to your audience and helpful.
See this example of a customer who had not been really paying attention to their Q&A content...where they weren't answering 90% of the questions that came in. Then....as soon as they started just going through and answering the questions well for their customers....their Q&A content (specifically) is springing to life. We communicated with them about their neglect in the fall and you can see as they started answering the questions you start to see an increase in impressions they start to take off.
As you can see the impressions/clicks go up pretty consistently with each other.
Note on "Highly competitive keywords take longer to rank for than less popular ones."
Here is another example of a customer using our solution where their Q&A content started ramping up in June/July....and you see a notable increase in impressions but they are in a MUCH more competitive space than the above...so you don't see the clicks following as clearly as the above example:
So...you can see the frequency/volume of the clicks is going up....but it's just not as drastic as the first example.
3) Timeline to Impact Google's Ranking of your Product and Category Pages
First....we want to make clear that there is a relationship between how your Q&A content is indexed and performs and how that impacts the rest of your site's product and category pages...and how they rank and perform. What was great about Google's August core ranking update is that the Q&A content exploded in performance on organic search....and through that very quick and clear rise you can see directly how the Q&A content impacts the rest of an ecommerce site's performance.
IMPORTANT NOTE: The below example is a seasonal businesses with their peaks in the summer and dips during the winter....so keep that in mind with all of these charts. You can see the overall lift by comparing dates year over year.
In this example.....see their core ecommerce site (product pages, category pages, etc.) but note that this chart DOES NOT cover the Q&A landing pages.....so you can see their overall site for pages that the Q&A is integrated into but not including the Q&A landing pages. You can see year over year in their peak months they had healthy growth to their site.
Now....look at what happened to their Q&A content and look at what happened in Google's 2024 August Update (started seeing lift in July 18th, 2024)....
In general, we did see a huge lift to Q&A content pages (we actually had to triple our cloud infrastructure given the new demand starting in July)....and the above example shows that lift. The most important thing about seeing that lift for the specific type of Q&A content is you can directly see how it impacts the rest of their site. See how the seasonal decline basically stopped declining as the Q&A content positions/traffic went up....see here:
In the last 28 days in Google Search Console....for that site the Q&A content is around 50% of of their overall traffic....which provides this lift to the rest of this site which are the pages they're really interested in. This is the connection between you publishing valuable content on your site and how that should help lift for the pages/searches that you're really interested in....which are people looking for the products that you sell that produces revenue.
That example above was an established Answerbase customer that has been answering questions on their site for years....so you can directly see the performance of the Q&A content and then how that is impacting their other pages like product and category pages. For new customers....you're just starting to build your Q&A knowledge base and that section of your site. We've see brand new sites they're using Answerbase's tool and AI-Enhanced product optimization tools, it can take 6-12 months to really start impacting the ranking of the product pages and the overall site's rankings...but we've seen it do both for the "Popular Products" tables as well as the overall domain position for target keywords.
As you post more and more great content Google is going to start respecting those pages and content more and more over time. Google's related content to products.....where let's say you have 90 questionable products on your site and 10 great products....how seriously is somebody going to look at your site? It's the same thing with content.....if you have 90% of your content that isn't original insights/information and adding value to the internet overall then Google and people don't take yoru site as seriously as others (again, regardless of how long the content is....Google and users don't care, they just want their questions answered). Not only that....but if you're publishing a bunch of copycat content with no original information insights, Google has communicated that it can even negatively impact your rankings (so beware of just trying to "compete" with competitor content without servicing your own customer's informational needs as the priority).
Content creation for SEO should be about fulfilling your customer's information demand with the best possible responses.....and SEO is an added benefit to effectively servicing your customers. Answerbase just makes that connection between the demand for information, the person within your organization who can fulfill it...and making that accessible to customers as efficient as possible both on your site and yes....through search engines as well. That grows your informational search traffic while also helping your overall rankings.
