Why Does the Keyword to People Also Ask Results Not Match?
This article was inspired by this BlackHatWorld thread which was questioning the source of the data for our PAA tool.
It's a great question and one that requires an example to be fully explained.
TL:DR Version
The nature of the PAA feature is dynamic, especially over time. And the short answer is that our data is generally a few months delayed which is why the Keyword <-> PAA mapping doesn't always line up as Google has moved on to showing a different PAA for the keyword.
Background
Few things to highlight with regards to the tool:
1) By default our tool shows every PAA we have ever captured which means more than a year's worth of PAA questions. The advantage of this setting is 1) More data and 2) A more accurate Popularity score as we have more data points.
But the downside is that the Keyword -> PAA mapping will be outdated.
2) To get a better chance of getting a hit with the Keyword -> PAA mapping we would recommend toggling the Data setting to be 'Recent' which includes data captured only in the last few months. So this is fresher data.
But even then since our tool is not real time, the Keyword -> PAA won't match always.
Live Example
Firstly, we want to assure everyone that EVERY single question you see is a real PAA that was captured from Google. It would be a lot more work to make some of this data up.
If you use a Rank Tracker that captures PAA for your SERPs, you can compare PAAs captured for any particular keyword at an interval of a few months and in a lot of cases you'll see many of them rotate over time.
If you have Ahrefs, they now have a cool functionality which allows you to see previous SERPs (and this includes PAA)!
So let’s go through a live example:
Query: 'dog grains'Results are toggled to the 'Recent' data:
Let's take a random keyword for this first PAA: 'best whole grain dog food'
Currently on Google, we do not see the PAA that we show associated with this keyword -'Is dog food with grains good for dogs?'
Let's go into Ahrefs for the same keyword and start looking at previous SERP snapshots:
SERP Snapshot July 2022: No PAA feature
SERP Snapshot June 2022: PAA doesn't match
SERP Snapshot May 2022: PAA doesn't match
SERP Snapshot April 2022: PAA match!
Using the Ahrefs functionality you can easily go back in time and see the various PAAs that have been rotated for a keyword. And you can see in the example above that over time the PAAs are different for the exact same keyword.
And this is why our tool is so powerful and cannot be compared to other simple real-time scrapers, because those just show one snapshot in time and not the complete picture.
We capture data all the time and recapture the same keyword over time too, hence why our popularity score is so vital as it accounts for the variable nature of PAAs.
As we keep working on enhancing the tool, we would love to hear from you - issues, feedback, ideas, anything!
We are actually users of the tools ourselves, and use this to enhance our workflow to come up with content and topic ideas. If you need any assistance in terms of how this tool could help you, please don't hesitate to reach out.
-Abhinav (co-founder of Search Response)