We saw Q&A content soar through Google's 2024 core updates....from March to November (current month) we saw about a 5x increase in organic traffic to Q&A content specifically....and we've also seen lift for our customers sites that the Q&A content is integrated in and around. There are a couple different ways we've seen this play out which we'd like to point out in this post. We're going to show two examples of different experiences over the last year....both of which have (1) had their overall site grow over the last 16 months and have (2) increased traffic to their Q&A through both 2024 core updates.
NOTE: Both of the below examples are 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.
Ecommerce Example 1 - Overall Traffic Growth to Core Site and Q&A specifically Dramatic Lift in August Core UpdateThe first example is has seen a year over year....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. So, this is probably the best case scenario that we've seen so far as far as percentage of overall traffic (where we have full access to their Google Search Console reports).....and what we can say about this site is it's a site where the person answering the questions has a lot of experience with the products they are answering questions about. This is very important for performing on SEO is sharing great answers...so we suspect this is why this is so high. If you haven't heard what content Google is rewarding now and what they're optimizing to reward in the future....we really encourage you to watch the snippet of video that is referenced in the following link of "
How to create and optimize content that is the best possible content for SEO now and into the future".
Now, let's see another thing we saw this year....
Ecommerce Example 2 - Overall Traffic Growth to Core Site and Q&A specifically Slow Grow Since MarchThe first example is has seen a year over year....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 the Q&A landing pages specifically....and how after Google's March 2024 core update.....the Q&A content went up notably.
Before Google's March core update, the Q&A was only about 2% of their overally traffic....but after the core update you can see that went up notably and is now 22% of their organic traffic....and given the above example we expect that the Q&A content was partly responsible for the lift in their overall site performance.
We hope this information is valuable to you for you and if you want some information about these examples and others please contact us.
