Long Questions People Type

What has been happening

Searches have been getting longer for years, driven first by voice and then by people simply learning that specific questions get better answers.

That has accelerated, since several months of conversing with tools that reward full sentences changes how people phrase things generally.

So the query arriving at your site is increasingly a complete question rather than two nouns.

Which changes what a page needs to do to satisfy it.

What a long query tells you

• The person knows what they want.
• They have a specific situation.
• They are further along in deciding.
• Fewer people are asking it.
• Fewer pages answer it properly.

The last two together are the opportunity. A long specific question has less competition and a higher proportion of people ready to act, which is the combination a small business can actually win.

Answer in the first two sentences

Which is the single change that matters most here.

Somebody arriving with a question wants the answer, not an introduction explaining that the subject is important.

Put the direct answer at the top, in plain words, and then explain, qualify, and expand below it.

That serves the reader, and it also serves any system trying to extract an answer from your page, which increasingly matters.

Most pages do the opposite, building up to an answer that appears in the seventh paragraph if at all.

Reordering an existing page to lead with the answer takes ten minutes and frequently changes how it performs.

Use the question as the heading

A small change with a disproportionate effect.

Write the heading as the question somebody actually typed, including the awkward phrasing.

How much does it cost to replace a panel on a fence beats fence panel replacement costs, because it is what a person would say.

That matches the query more closely and it reads better to the human who arrives.

Get the exact phrasings from your search console rather than inventing them, since the real ones are always slightly stranger than you would guess.

Then answer that heading immediately underneath rather than beginning a general discussion.

A worked example

A business had a page about a service that ranked reasonably and converted poorly.

Their search console showed people arriving on it with questions about one specific circumstance, phrased at length, which the page did not address until near the bottom.

They restructured it: the question as a heading, a two-sentence answer, then the detail, then the price range.

Time on the page rose and enquiries from it roughly doubled over three months.

They also added three further questions from the same list, each with the same structure.

The content had largely existed already and had been in the wrong order.

Do not pad the answer

Since the instinct with a question page is to write more.

A question with a short answer should have a short answer, followed by whatever genuinely qualifies it.

Padding it to a thousand words to look substantial produces exactly the kind of page the last year has been about.

If the honest answer is between four hundred and eight hundred dollars depending on access, say that, explain what access means, and stop.

A short page that answers completely beats a long one that circles, and increasingly so.

Where these questions come from

The same sources as everything else worth writing.

Your search console query list, which contains the real phrasings.

Your inbox and call notes, which contain the questions before they are typed.

The related questions shown on the results page itself, which are a direct list of what else people ask.

And the searches on your own site that produced nothing.

Collect them somewhere and write one page for each group, which is a content plan that never runs out.

Group them properly

Since ten phrasings of one question is one page.

How much does it cost, what does it cost, and how much do you charge are the same question and belong together.

Write the page for the underlying question and let the variations sit within it naturally.

Building a page per phrasing produces pages competing with each other and the thin-page problem in a new shape.

Group by what the person wants to know, which is a shorter list than the phrase list.

The related questions box is a free list

Worth using deliberately, since it is sitting on the results page for every term you care about.

Search your main question and read the block of related questions, then open one and watch it expand into more.

That is a direct list of what else people ask around your subject, generated from real queries rather than from a tool's estimates.

Copy out the ones you can answer properly, group them, and you have a content plan for several months in about fifteen minutes.

Check it again in six months, since the list changes as the questions people ask change.

Mark up the questions properly

A technical detail worth asking about once the pages exist.

Questions and answers on a page can be marked in the underlying code so that search engines can recognise them as such, which sometimes produces an expanded result.

Most platforms have a setting or a plugin for this, so it is a request rather than a project.

Only mark up questions genuinely present on the page and answered there, since marking up things that are not visible is against the guidelines and gets the feature withdrawn.

It is a small gain and it costs almost nothing where the pages are already written this way.

The counter-case

Short queries still exist in volume.

Plenty of people still type two words, particularly for local searches where the location does the specifying, and those searches produce real work.

Question pages also attract people gathering information rather than buying, so the intent varies within them.

And a business with three pages should get those three right before adding question pages.

Take the real phrasings from your search console, use them as headings, answer in the first two sentences, and stop when the answer is complete.

What to do

1. Read your query list for long phrases.
2. Group them by underlying question.
3. Use the real phrasing as a heading.
4. Answer in two sentences.
5. Explain and qualify below.
6. Include the price range.
7. Stop when it is answered.

Step four is the change most pages need, since the content is frequently already there and buried under an introduction nobody wanted.

The single-question version of this is covered in the question you answer on every phone call.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.