Answer
Apr 21, 2025 - 08:42 AM
Let's Start with The Bottom Line - Create Great Answers for Your Customers
When customers ask us "How do we answer questions best for SEO?"....the answer is always this:
"Don't think about SEO, think about your customers!"
When Google talks about SEO when it comes to content, they talk about "Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content"...and then when they address where SEO fits into the picture and when/how they'll respect your SEO efforts...they say this:
"SEO can be a helpful activity when it is applied to people-first content, rather than search engine-first content."
You can see that exact quote within their guide on how to create content moving forward in a section titled "What about SEO? Isn't that search engine-first?". Your SEO efforts can and will be respected by Google to help achieve your goals there....but only if you're creating "people-first" helpful content that helps Google do what it needs to do....which is satisfying every informational search on the planet with great content from people who actually have unique and new experience on the topic.
Now...the good news is...when they define "people-first content" their first bullet point is this:
"Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you?"
When people come to you....they ask you questions, that's how they request content. So....a question from your customer is "people-first" at it's core. That covers the question of "What do I write about?" and that is what you should focus on...and then what you need to do is make sure that you have somebody providing the content that actually knows what they're talking about within the answers...based on their own knowledge and experience (to create the content and properly vet and moderate the content). Google is looking for sites that are consistently showing that the content they're publishing is creating new value for the whole world (not just repeating what is already out there, we encourage you to read what Google's said about this)....so make sure you're doing that.
Again, your focus should 100% be on taking care of your customers, answering their questions as best as you can (best doesn't necessarily mean long) and just understanding that your answer will service many more people after this first customer who asked it. If you do that, you're doing a great job for this customer, future visitors, and it will also be the most beneficial thing you can do for SEO when it comes to content creation. Let's dig in a bit more on these topics of what we see happen and we'll try to save you from some common pitfalls, so you can start off on the right foot.
Help Us Help You...if You Create Great Content, It Will Be Rewarded
At the end of the day....the amount of helpful knowledge that is on the Internet for Google to get ahold of and provide as results is a fraction of the knowledge that is locked in people's brains. Google needs that content in order to provide it's results....and if you're providing that knowledge Google will reference those results from whoever they identify is consistently providing good and valuable information that is bringing value to the world.
If you provide that....Google will reward you. It needs to reward you...because they need that content to satisfy the searchers (and so will any Google competitor). See this example of a customer who started with us in March of 2024 and then see the activity over the first 12 months to their Q&A knowledge base where it drives over 600K organic visitors over the first year of having the account.
A few notes on this account:
Now above is an example of a customer who created a lot of great content that Google respected and continues to respect over time, but you need to understand it's because they created good Q&A content that actually creates value for the world. Don't cheat it....don't take short-cuts that sacrifice quality....we'll dig into why next.
Service Your Customers Well and Be Patient
Google has communicated clearly that their goal is to reward content and companies who are creating content that best helps people, and they will always be optimizing towards that (really let that sink in: they will always be optimizing towards that....forever and ever and ever). We highly encourage you to watch this video clip on how Google communicates this point (if you press play, it'll go over the high level point in less than a minute)...and they have to do that because it services searchers well...and they need to satisfy searchers in order to survive and thrive as a company.
If organic traffic is important to you....we highly recommend you watch that whole video. It's an interview with a highly respected SEO influencer asking Google about it's latest changes because the SEO ecosystem has been disrupted notably through the latest updates. Danny Sullivan from Google is explaining to her why Google needs to satisfy the searchers (despite what it does to the "SEO Ecosystem")...and it comes down to finding and rewarding "helpful content" and the creators who have the knowledge to create that helpful content.
So...the above needs to be your guide....and through your Q&A content (powered by Answerbase of course) you should have that same focus. As Google evaluates the content out there and evaluates the content you're publishing on your Q&A knowledge base....we've seen Q&A knowledge bases that Google was already performing well get significant boosts overnight as Google makes a further determination that this is the best content out there for the searchers. See example here (seasonal business with peaks during summer and dips during winter) and you see where their content was already almost double year-over-year but on July 18th (Google's "August Core Update") it took it to another level.
We've also seen relatively low performing customers take off after certain Google "Core Updates". See this customer who went from the Q&A only producing about 2% of their organic traffic to now it's over 20% of their organic traffic after Google March Core Update.
See this other customer who experienced something similar after Google December Core Update...where you see it just take off and reach a new level of traffic....
Again....the customer did nothing different...it was just Google discovering the content and re-evaluating the other content on the topic..and selecting that content and section of that site more favorably. We've seen this happen at different times during different Google core updates for different customers....so all you need to be focused on is creating valuable content for your customers (which you should be doing that anyway) and Google will do what Google does at it looks to get the best content in front of the searchers.
Are there Any Obvious Pitfalls I Need to Avoid from The Start?
We've had a few customers come to us and ask why their Q&A content hasn't been respected by Google or if it doesn't happen very quickly they start to worry, and every time this has happened when we dig in.....it comes down to one of the following reasons:
Now....that sets the foundation for what should be done, what can be expected, and what to try to troubleshoot if you're not seeing results. Below we're going to run through several scenarios that we've seen play out to better inform you on what you may expect and why.
Do You Have an "SEO First" Mentality, Change It!
When we first got in touch with this customer, they only cared about their product page traffic and didn't care about the customer's being served through informational pages about the product. We tried to explain that wasn't going to be good for their customers...we remember very clearly they said "I don't want to say I don't care about my customers, but I just want more traffic.". This mentality is far too common....and it needs to change. Interestingly, this customer signed up for the service but they didn't answer over 95% of their customers questions! We had a heart to heart with the customer and reinforced the point of why helping their customers through answering questions was critical for the performance of their SEO....and they finally started servicing their customer. We had that talk in September 2024 and see what's happened to their Q&A knowledge base since:
Interestingly, in order to perform for SEO....you need to force yourself stop thinking about SEO as the priority! Focus on your customer first....service them...and then it's ok to "think about SEO". When Google talks about SEO when it comes to content....they communicate very clearly that you need to create helpful "people-first" content...and then SEO fits into that picture. See how they address this in their guide on creating helpful, reliable, people first content and how people should "do SEO" when it comes to content moving forward and what they'll respect.
"SEO can be a helpful activity when it is applied to people-first content, rather than search engine-first content."
If you're creating valuable "people first" content where you're adding value to the world through your content....Google will recognize it, index it, and it'll lift the rankings of the stuff that you're interested in...which is your shorter tail product and category searches.
Don't Try to Game the System - Google Knows It and Will Crush It
The SEO world and services that are provided have notoriously tried to find ways of cheating the system in order to "perform better for SEO" vs actually providing value through very good Q&A content. You need to NOT DO THIS. Google is getting better and better and understanding who is just publishing content for SEO vs who is providing content that is actually providing value to the planet. See the example below where this customer hired and intern who knew nothing about their business or products and that individual just published a bunch of AI-Generated content hoping that "more is better" without proper judgement and moderation of that content. See what happened to them in this chart:
A few notes on this chart:
Back to the Bottom Line - Create Great Answers for Your Customers
As we said in the beginning....
"Don't think about SEO, think about your customers!"
You should be doing this anyway, don't look at your customer questions as an annoyance...its the best opportunity to understand what information they're needing that you don't have and for you to be recognized as the page and site that fulfills it...which will drive your rankings and SEO success when it comes to content creation.
When customers ask us "How do we answer questions best for SEO?"....the answer is always this:
"Don't think about SEO, think about your customers!"
When Google talks about SEO when it comes to content, they talk about "Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content"...and then when they address where SEO fits into the picture and when/how they'll respect your SEO efforts...they say this:
"SEO can be a helpful activity when it is applied to people-first content, rather than search engine-first content."
You can see that exact quote within their guide on how to create content moving forward in a section titled "What about SEO? Isn't that search engine-first?". Your SEO efforts can and will be respected by Google to help achieve your goals there....but only if you're creating "people-first" helpful content that helps Google do what it needs to do....which is satisfying every informational search on the planet with great content from people who actually have unique and new experience on the topic.
Now...the good news is...when they define "people-first content" their first bullet point is this:
"Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you?"
When people come to you....they ask you questions, that's how they request content. So....a question from your customer is "people-first" at it's core. That covers the question of "What do I write about?" and that is what you should focus on...and then what you need to do is make sure that you have somebody providing the content that actually knows what they're talking about within the answers...based on their own knowledge and experience (to create the content and properly vet and moderate the content). Google is looking for sites that are consistently showing that the content they're publishing is creating new value for the whole world (not just repeating what is already out there, we encourage you to read what Google's said about this)....so make sure you're doing that.
Again, your focus should 100% be on taking care of your customers, answering their questions as best as you can (best doesn't necessarily mean long) and just understanding that your answer will service many more people after this first customer who asked it. If you do that, you're doing a great job for this customer, future visitors, and it will also be the most beneficial thing you can do for SEO when it comes to content creation. Let's dig in a bit more on these topics of what we see happen and we'll try to save you from some common pitfalls, so you can start off on the right foot.
Help Us Help You...if You Create Great Content, It Will Be Rewarded
At the end of the day....the amount of helpful knowledge that is on the Internet for Google to get ahold of and provide as results is a fraction of the knowledge that is locked in people's brains. Google needs that content in order to provide it's results....and if you're providing that knowledge Google will reference those results from whoever they identify is consistently providing good and valuable information that is bringing value to the world.
If you provide that....Google will reward you. It needs to reward you...because they need that content to satisfy the searchers (and so will any Google competitor). See this example of a customer who started with us in March of 2024 and then see the activity over the first 12 months to their Q&A knowledge base where it drives over 600K organic visitors over the first year of having the account.
A few notes on this account:
- 1.5 Million Visitors Expected to Q&A in Next 12 Months: If you take the last 30 days of activity and project that into what the content will do in the next 12 months....the "run rate" of the organic traffic is that we would expect it to drive over 1.5MM organic visitors in year 2 (and that is a conservative projection not taking into account any future growth).
- 87% of their Q&A Content Indexed By Google: The above example has over 87% of their Q&A landing pages indexed by Google, which speaks to the quality of their Q&A pairs that Google is consistently crawling them and choosing to put them in their index. If you're generating great Q&A content with both the question and the answer with content providing additional value to the world, it will be respected and will be indexed.
- What is Your Timeline for Proven Success?: See that on this account...the first 2-4 months of the account may be looked at as "ho hum" results...but then look at what happens as Google really kicks it into gear as far as how they respect the content. Answerbase has no control over Google, how quickly the crawl your content, if they choose to index it, and how they choose to rank it....but we do know that for customers who are consistently creating valuable Q&A content....Google does eventually get to it, rewards it, and continues to reward it.
- How Much Content Was Created?: For the customer above....keep in mind that they published over 29K Q&A pairs over the first 12 months....so that's not a light amount of helpful content. But...you can learn something there about what you may expect if you're creating valuable Q&A pairs, it basically comes down to around 44 visitors to each Q&A pair over a 12 month period.
- How Should This Impact You?: As mentioned above...each Q&A pair posted services not only the original customer, but 44 future visitors and customers. So....just know that when you're answering a customer question, you're not just answering it for one user. You're answering it for many visitors and customers in the future who have no idea that your site even exists. Introduce them to your site/brand through great helpful content....and have that in mind when you answer questions. Spend the extra 2-3 minutes to make sure it's great, it's worth your time....and it's not a lot of time if you compare it to trying to create long-format articles.
Now above is an example of a customer who created a lot of great content that Google respected and continues to respect over time, but you need to understand it's because they created good Q&A content that actually creates value for the world. Don't cheat it....don't take short-cuts that sacrifice quality....we'll dig into why next.
Service Your Customers Well and Be Patient
Google has communicated clearly that their goal is to reward content and companies who are creating content that best helps people, and they will always be optimizing towards that (really let that sink in: they will always be optimizing towards that....forever and ever and ever). We highly encourage you to watch this video clip on how Google communicates this point (if you press play, it'll go over the high level point in less than a minute)...and they have to do that because it services searchers well...and they need to satisfy searchers in order to survive and thrive as a company.
If organic traffic is important to you....we highly recommend you watch that whole video. It's an interview with a highly respected SEO influencer asking Google about it's latest changes because the SEO ecosystem has been disrupted notably through the latest updates. Danny Sullivan from Google is explaining to her why Google needs to satisfy the searchers (despite what it does to the "SEO Ecosystem")...and it comes down to finding and rewarding "helpful content" and the creators who have the knowledge to create that helpful content.
So...the above needs to be your guide....and through your Q&A content (powered by Answerbase of course) you should have that same focus. As Google evaluates the content out there and evaluates the content you're publishing on your Q&A knowledge base....we've seen Q&A knowledge bases that Google was already performing well get significant boosts overnight as Google makes a further determination that this is the best content out there for the searchers. See example here (seasonal business with peaks during summer and dips during winter) and you see where their content was already almost double year-over-year but on July 18th (Google's "August Core Update") it took it to another level.
We've also seen relatively low performing customers take off after certain Google "Core Updates". See this customer who went from the Q&A only producing about 2% of their organic traffic to now it's over 20% of their organic traffic after Google March Core Update.
See this other customer who experienced something similar after Google December Core Update...where you see it just take off and reach a new level of traffic....
Again....the customer did nothing different...it was just Google discovering the content and re-evaluating the other content on the topic..and selecting that content and section of that site more favorably. We've seen this happen at different times during different Google core updates for different customers....so all you need to be focused on is creating valuable content for your customers (which you should be doing that anyway) and Google will do what Google does at it looks to get the best content in front of the searchers.
Are there Any Obvious Pitfalls I Need to Avoid from The Start?
We've had a few customers come to us and ask why their Q&A content hasn't been respected by Google or if it doesn't happen very quickly they start to worry, and every time this has happened when we dig in.....it comes down to one of the following reasons:
- They're Not Taking Care of Their Customer with Content: You need to understand that when it comes to content...the only thing you need to be concerned about is your customer. You need to ensure that every Q&A pair that you choose to publish through Answerbase (or this really should apply to any content through any other channel) has a "yes" answer to this question....."Is this piece of content going to be helpful for the person when they get to this page on my site?" You should be doing that anyway...and if you're not doing that, you need to change your mindset on why you're creating content. It has to be really valuable for your visitor and when you have unique experience and expertise around the topic, you need to be adding that to the content so you create value for the planet. We have customers who have come to us and said "Why isn't Q&A working for us?" and then we see that over 95% of their questions have gone unanswered. We can't do our job unless you're taking care of your customers, and you should be doing that anyway. Answerbase just makes it much more efficient than traditional "content marketing" processes...and in a way that Google has steered towards and continues to steer towards.
- Need to Align Expectations with Reality with SEO: If you're publishing great content that you are confident that is useful for a future customer on your site...then you should be very confident that you're taking care of your customers as best as you can and that should be enough. Now....after that, Google is going to judge when to read it and what it thinks about the new content you've published. When it comes to crawling your site, Google's timing on when that happens is dependent upon how often you've historically updated your site and also if Google has recognized those updates as creating new value to the world historically on your site (if you're not producing new content of real/new value or not that content regularly, why would Google prioritize keeping up to date on the new stuff you push out?). Now....once Google reads your site....then they're going to judge (1) does this add unique experience, insight and value on this topic and (2) how should it rank against all of the other content related to that topic. Part of the frustration with SEO (for you and Answerbase) is we don't have much control over some of this...but that is why when you "create content for SEO" it's important that "You shouldn't be publishing content for SEO, you should be publishing it for your visitors and customers!". If you're doing that....Google will continue to optimize for getting to your content and you should see that benefit you over time.
- They're Not Publishing Good Content: The fact that they're not publishing good content for their customers that is actually helpful for them. Keep in mind that "helpful" doesn't mean "long".....most of the content that is published by Answerbase customers are relatively short answers to questions...."helpful" just means that it satisfies exactly what the customer was looking for (no matter what length). We've had customers tell us that they're publishing great content but then we look at the Q&A content they're publishing and it isn't content that anyone on their product page would ever look at and walk away with a "that is helpful!" impression. So, please (1) be honest with yourself on your own content and (2) consider the resource that you have creating, reviewing and publishing the content...and make sure they have the judgement to make that call.
Now....that sets the foundation for what should be done, what can be expected, and what to try to troubleshoot if you're not seeing results. Below we're going to run through several scenarios that we've seen play out to better inform you on what you may expect and why.
Do You Have an "SEO First" Mentality, Change It!
When we first got in touch with this customer, they only cared about their product page traffic and didn't care about the customer's being served through informational pages about the product. We tried to explain that wasn't going to be good for their customers...we remember very clearly they said "I don't want to say I don't care about my customers, but I just want more traffic.". This mentality is far too common....and it needs to change. Interestingly, this customer signed up for the service but they didn't answer over 95% of their customers questions! We had a heart to heart with the customer and reinforced the point of why helping their customers through answering questions was critical for the performance of their SEO....and they finally started servicing their customer. We had that talk in September 2024 and see what's happened to their Q&A knowledge base since:
Interestingly, in order to perform for SEO....you need to force yourself stop thinking about SEO as the priority! Focus on your customer first....service them...and then it's ok to "think about SEO". When Google talks about SEO when it comes to content....they communicate very clearly that you need to create helpful "people-first" content...and then SEO fits into that picture. See how they address this in their guide on creating helpful, reliable, people first content and how people should "do SEO" when it comes to content moving forward and what they'll respect.
"SEO can be a helpful activity when it is applied to people-first content, rather than search engine-first content."
If you're creating valuable "people first" content where you're adding value to the world through your content....Google will recognize it, index it, and it'll lift the rankings of the stuff that you're interested in...which is your shorter tail product and category searches.
Don't Try to Game the System - Google Knows It and Will Crush It
The SEO world and services that are provided have notoriously tried to find ways of cheating the system in order to "perform better for SEO" vs actually providing value through very good Q&A content. You need to NOT DO THIS. Google is getting better and better and understanding who is just publishing content for SEO vs who is providing content that is actually providing value to the planet. See the example below where this customer hired and intern who knew nothing about their business or products and that individual just published a bunch of AI-Generated content hoping that "more is better" without proper judgement and moderation of that content. See what happened to them in this chart:
A few notes on this chart:
- Interesting Start (Don't get excited, gets crushed later...): As Google finds the Q&A knowledge base and then finds that a lot of content is being published for it to index/rank....they see a pulse in the beginning and then as Google crawls/indexes more content...you see this huge spike. For this customer they got super excited thinking they "found the loophole" in how they could be lazy and drive a ton of traffic to their site with a super low value resource on their end. It was great, till it wasn't....it got crushed.
- Google Knows if You're Publishing Garbage: Google now understands if you're publishing content that is valuable for the planet....meaning, creating information gain for the world on a topic. The issue with the above site is (1) the intern they hired can't add anything of value to the world on the topic because they have no experience on the products or product category and (2) Google knew relatively quickly that they were publishing a bunch of AI stuff without any intelligent moderation or adding anything new of value. Google knows.
- Abusing AI for Content Generation: If you're using AI for efficiency, it can be a super valuable tool. If you're using AI to try to game Google....Google knows it and will crush it. Google has something called "Scaled Content Abuse" (read the documentation) where it can recognize if you're publishing a bunch of AI generated content for trying to manipulate SEO vs being helpful to visitors.
- The "Good News" in This Chart: The good news for this chart is....Google only recognized the garbage content was in the customer's Q&A knowledge base, so it looks like they just crushed that Q&A knowledge base getting any traffic and it didn't impact the organic performance of the rest of their site. It's as if Google looks for new sites and sections of sites...and determines some kind of "section wide" reputation and if you're publishing a bunch of trash in that section....they just stop respecting it but still may respect other valuable sections of your site where you do have value there.
Back to the Bottom Line - Create Great Answers for Your Customers
As we said in the beginning....
"Don't think about SEO, think about your customers!"
You should be doing this anyway, don't look at your customer questions as an annoyance...its the best opportunity to understand what information they're needing that you don't have and for you to be recognized as the page and site that fulfills it...which will drive your rankings and SEO success when it comes to content creation.
