Answer Engines and Video: Ranking with Questions and Answers (Recorded October 2020)

Are you doing answer engine optimisation yet?

If you do a bit of SEO and you are not combining answer engines with video, you are missing the single biggest opportunity in search right now. To all of you out there who do a bit of SEO, ask yourself, are you doing this? If you are not, why aren't you? And if you are not offering it as a service to your clients, get with the programme.

There is literally a world of opportunity out there with video, and I see so many SEO agencies that are just pants, frankly utter crap. You really do need to be using answer engines, video, and the combination of the two, to rank your clients at the top of Google. Anybody who wants help with it, by all means send me a DM and I will send you the tools and show you what we would do.

How does the answer engine tool work?

You search a question and the tool brings up a whole tree of all the answers that are coming out of the back end of Google on that topic. If we search a question and click search, that is what appears.

You can then zoom in to see the questions more closely. You might find that some of them are irrelevant, or you might want to expand some of them. The tool lets you expand these questions and see what is behind them, and it will grow and grow and grow until the point at which you have got the list of questions that you want to answer on your website. That is ridiculously powerful.

Should you answer those questions in blogs or in video?

Answer them in video, because in terms of SEO that is pretty much the best content you are going to make at the moment. I had the same question with a marketing manager this morning. There is a challenge in terms of the amount of content you can make, and Google is looking to work with video. It wants as much video as it can get.

Yes, you could answer all of these questions in blogs and that would be great. That is part of the way there. But what we have been doing with a lot of clients is answering the questions in a video blog and then getting it to come up in search and rank at the top of Google.

Think about the questions that your customer could be asking. If you go to Google and type in questions it will show you a list of questions and you can expand that. The content that is coming to the top at the moment, pretty much, if you make it in a video, is very, very easy to rank at the top of Google.

What does this look like inside Google search?

Type your question into Google, scroll to People Also Ask, and keep expanding it, and you will watch Google build a bank of related questions in front of you. I have typed in how do I install a patio door. If I scroll down you can see People Also Ask and this list of questions. If I expand it, you can see that answer is coming off diynetwork.com, which is obviously an authority site. If you have got an authority site, or you want to be an authority, you have to build this type of content.

If I close and open this and keep clicking, you can see it is going to build a massive bank of content, and as you can see most of these all relate to the topic. The first one is a text based answer. The second is text again, and that one is coming from Glass Doctor. The third one is where it gets a lot more interesting, because the answer here is in a video and it is on YouTube.

If you can answer the questions correctly around your topic, and this is what we are helping a lot of clients do at the moment, you build content that ranks in these questions and at the top of Google, and obviously answers your customer's pain points. These videos that rank make an enormous difference, because this is what Google wants and this is what Google is pushing towards.

Where is this all heading?

Google wants all of the answers built into Google Home, and every other answer engine wants the same thing. If you extrapolate, if you go to the end game and look at what Google really wants, Google wants all of the answers built into Google Home. You have got Alexa, Siri, Cortana, Bixby, all the answer engines, and they are all begging for content. They want a ton of content and they want pretty much all of it to be questions and answers.

So think about it from a strategy point of view. If you can build all of the answers to the questions that your customer is potentially asking, and do that properly in video, you really hit the jackpot in terms of SEO.

If this is not something that your SEO agency is pushing you to do and working with you on as a strategy, well, I would be asking them why not. This is sort of SEO 101 nowadays. So see if they are doing it. If they are not, give me a buzz and I will gladly help you.