Are you still ignoring this simple trick to better rankings?

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Hey—It's Tim. 

I’m writing this on two screens: left one is my doc, right one is a live Google SERP.

Coffee nearby
Spotify on the 2016 Doom OST 🤘
Hiding from the sun. It’s 26c and I am but a pasty British boy.
(As my girlfriend keeps reminding me….)

Why the SERP? Because today’s traffic win is hiding in plain sight, inside that grey “People also ask” box everyone scrolls past.

Everyone’s out hunting keywords. I’m raiding questions.

The average brief I see starts: “Find me a juicy keyword, build 2,000 words, sprinkle sub-headers, call it a day.”
Fine.
Predictable.
Also very 2021.

Open any decent SERP and Google literally hands you a list of breakout questions real humans are typing next. They refresh, cascade, spawn cousins the moment you click.

It’s the closest thing we’ve got to sitting behind the search bar and eavesdropping.

Yet nine out of ten articles never bother to answer them.

Crazy, I know.

How I squeeze the box for traffic

1. Search the core topic
   Type your primary keyword, click one PAA dropdown. Instantly, four more bloom. Keep tapping until you’ve got 15–20 live questions in a doc.
   

2. The order is important
   The ones you see first are to be broken out into your different H2’s. As you expand them, they are more sub-topics of the parent question. Use these to build of the H3’s, and small topics.
   

3. Bucket by intent
   You’ll spot patterns fast: definitions, “vs.” comparisons, cost queries, troubleshooting. Group ’em. Each bucket morphs into a tight sub-section or—when it’s meaty enough—a standalone post that links back.
   

4. Answer like a human, structure like a bot

   • First sentence = direct answer (win the snippet).

   • Two-three lines of context (win the reader).

   • Bullets, examples, anecdotes (keep ’em scrolling).
     My Montessori of SEO: short, clear, skimmable sentences that still feel like a chat.
     

5. Loop experience in
   The thing I’ve been doing recently is taking these PAA questions, giving them to my conversation Penny (WIP, it’s coming) and then just talking about them. This get’s my personal experience out into the open, and my first hand thoughts onto the page in like 20 mins.
   

6. Keep the box open
   Every algorithm refresh, revisit the SERP. New questions appear, old ones vanish. I treat it like tending a bonsai - snip, shape, water. Tiny trims, evergreen gains.

What this looked like last week

• Core post: “Internal Linking for SaaS: The Playbook.”
  

• Snagged PAAs:
  • “How many internal links is too many?”
  • “Does anchor text still matter for internal links?”
  • “Are footer links good for SEO?”
  

• Threw them at Penny. Spent 10 mins chatting about them and added the highlights of the conversation into my Internal Linking article.
  

• Two days later Google lifted the article into Featured Snippet land for “internal linking anchor text” (400 MSV, but laser-qualified). Organic demo sign-ups? +11 %. Tiny hinge, big door.

Skip the guesswork.

Let Google hand you the questions; you just bring the answers.

✌️ Tim "Query McQuestionface" Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

P.S. Secret handshake: open a Google SERP, expand two PAA questions, then hit Ctrl + U (view source) and search for "related_questions".
You’ll find the full hidden tree -sometimes 60-plus questions- sitting there in plain HTML. It’s a jumble of a lot of code too, so just copy paste it into your flavour of LLM and ask it to sort. Easy mode.

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