Does Answering People Also Ask Questions Improve Rankings? (SEO Study w/ Chris Green)

Chris Green joins Search with Candour to share his study on whether answering Google’s “People Also Ask” (PAA) questions correlates with higher organic rankings. 📖 Read the study in full: https://alsoasked.com/insights/paa-ranking-correlation Key takeaways📈Across the top 5 positions, pages that fully answer more PAA questions tend to rank higher.📊Commercial and transactional queries show the strongest correlations; navigational and informational queries are weaker.📉Beyond page 1, the correlation drops sharply and can even reverse in lower page 2 positions—likely due to small sample sizes and SERP variability.Answering PAA questions alone isn’t enough to rank well; technical quality, external signals, and user experience still matter.✅Covering a wide range of related questions can make content semantically richer, which may support ranking potential.Follow Chris Green🔗Website - https://www.chris-green.net/🔗LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisgreenseo/00:00 Do PAA Boost Rankings01:21 Show Intro and Context03:12 Meet Chris Green04:48 Why PAA Matters Now06:14 Originality and Value Proxy12:28 Study Setup and Intent Buckets16:02 SERP Sampling Top 2017:48 Scraping Content at Scale19:28 How Deep to Pull PAA21:01 Crawl Errors and Bot Blocks23:38 Cleaning Scrape Data24:00 Scraping Ethics and Bots26:09 Study Setup and Scoring27:29 Key Findings and Correlations32:48 Why Intent Was Messy36:43 Full vs Partial Answers39:37 Client Action Plan44:57 Beyond PAA Question Mining47:23 Where to Follow Chris48:12 Episode Wrap and Teaser