Ask twelve eCommerce SEO experts what SEO is and you will get a baker’s dozen of answers, if not more.

One thing you’ll hear, for sure, though, is that it has to do with keywords, and it does.

There are four main pillars of SEO: on-page, off-page, technical SEO, and content.

Three of them (all except technical) rely largely on your use of keywords on page copy as well as on third-party domains – for instance, a link back to your website using a target keyword as anchor text should increase your ranking for that keyword.

Let alone the fact that the whole point of SEO is to show up in the Search results when a user types in a specific keyword.

But here’s the kicker: while SEO is about keywords, it’s not quite that simple.

If it were, you’d be able to pepper your website with all the target keywords you wanted to rank for, kick up your heels, and watching the rankings soar.

That actually used to work – like ten years ago. Today it is a widely known black hat SEO technique known as “keyword stuffing.”

Today, we don’t stuff keywords. We answer questions that include keywords. That is one of the most delectable secret sauces of which I personally am aware that gets SEO to “work.”

Here’s what I mean.

It’s About More Than Just Keywords: Why This Is Effective

Let’s take a keyword as an example. For the means of convenience, we’ll make that keyword “eCommerce SEO.”

If you want a page to rank for that keyword, it has to be on the page, right?

Sure, I’m with you that far. But it also has to be contextually relevant. If you take a blog on gardening and stick “eCommerce SEO” in the title, headers, and in the copy in a few places, it’s still not going to rank for that keyword.

Google, and your human users, are smarter than that.

So first, the page has to be relevant to the keyword (or vice-versa, you might say).

Second, the page has to involve the keyword naturally. It can’t just be plopped in there.

So even if you took a page from this website, and stick “eCommerce SEO” on it with no context, it’s not going to rank.

What you need to do is answer a question related to the keyword.

When users hit the Google search bar, they’re looking for answers to something. Maybe they’re looking to buy a product. Maybe they want to know how many clothing outlets are within 5 miles of them.

Maybe they want to know how SEO works. Whatever; there’s a question, and you need to answer it.

So if you want to get a page to rank for SEO, first you need to research what it is and what people are searching for.

Then, you can restructure a page that you want to rank in such a format that it either implicitly or explicitly answers a question.

Here’s a hypothetical: say users want to know what Search Volume is.

I could structure a page in the following manner:

What is search volume?

Search volume is metric that shows how many users are searching for a given query.

That explicitly answers the question, but it lacks context.

Instead, I could structure a portion of a page to contain the following copy:

Search volume and difficulty are two metrics associated with search queries that relate to the number of searches performed in a given period of time, as well as how hard it is to rank for that search term comparatively. Both of these, and other metrics, such as CPC (cost-per-click) and number of results are used by SEO experts to determine which keywords make the most sense to target for an SEO campaign.

In the instance above, I wrote an organic paragraph that lends some information related to search volume, as well as to other keyword metrics.

It does not explicitly answer the question of what search volume is, but the answer is in there, so there’s a chance that when someone searches for “what is search volume,” this page, with that portion highlighted, will show up in the search results.

Now that that’s out of the way, here are a few good tips and techniques for answering user queries for better SEO.

Not Sure What to Answer? Here’s a Pro Tip

When you’re new to this sort of thing, it can be tough knowing how you should be answering user queries for better SEO, specifically, so here’s a really good suggestion, again using the keyword “eCommerce SEO” as an example.

Type that keyword into the search bar – just that keyword, literatim.

Scroll down a little till you see what is highlighted on my screen in the image below:

That section in red, nestled between two organic listings for SEMRush and BigCommerce, is called the People Also Ask section, sometimes referred to as “PAA” by SEO junkies.

That section is a gold mine for SEO experts, and especially for content writers like yours truly.

In it, you will find a bunch of questions that users are searching frequently. I have no idea what the search volumes of those exact questions are, but I can tell you this: it’s enough that Google gives a darn, and has taken excerpts from popular posts/content pages with answers to those questions.

So, if you have a keyword you want to target but you aren’t sure what questions to answer, start by answering the People Also Ask questions, and don’t just pirate the answers from Google. Reflect on them and see if your professional experience can offer any additional, novel insight.

And remember this: you don’t need to answer every question directly. You can do it through content (product descriptions, blog copy, CMS page copy) in a roundabout way.

Here’s another tip. If you have access to a tool like SEMRush, you can actually see the sorts of questions users are looking for that are relevant to a given target keyword. The thing is, with SEMRush, you can also see other vital metrics like volumes and difficulties associated with those queries.

If you’re interested in this method, use the keyword overview tool, then scroll to the bottom of the page. Here’s where the questions are:

For this keyword (eCommerce SEO), there are 116 questions for which SEMRush has data. As you can see, some of them have some pretty fierce difficulty scores, so while you won’t go wrong answering the question “What is eCommerce SEO?” there’s a really low chance your page will rank for it.

It’s better to answer questions like “What eCommerce platform is best for SEO?” since that one has a relatively low difficulty score. Or, you could make one huge page and answer all 116 of them. That might get you some rankings. Either way, this is a really good tip to know.

Finally, here’s one more tip. If you don’t want to use these above suggestions, just think about things customers (or potential customers) have asked you. Answer those questions instead and you should still see rankings increase.

Structure Blog Posts or Create a Dedicated FAQ CMS Page

Here’s another technique you can bake into your SEO strategy which might be able to get you a few featured snippets – if you’re thorough answering questions with phrases that are keyword optimized, and you target the right keywords.

One great way to get started answering user queries for better SEO is to compile a list of questions, then configure a question-based blog that answers all of them, either expressly or indirectly.

But, here’s a better tip, at least in my estimation. Make a FAQs page, come up with all of the questions you can that are relevant to that page, and answer them all in sequence.

The good thing about a FAQ page is that it will be evergreen, and it won’t be dated, so it will be eternally relevant. If you post good answers today, theoretically, if the industry remains unchanged, you could still have strong rankings for the exact same URL in ten years.

Here’s how you keep that momentum going, though. Once you make the FAQs page, update it at least twice per year with new questions. You can get these questions from customers, or use a tool like Google or SEMRush to help get your creative juices flowing.

Google will see fresh activity on the page (which will make the web page more recent) and moreover, this rolling approach gives you the flexibility to create a truly encyclopedic page that can serve as a single point of reference for all questions related to a specific group of related keywords.

Then, if you really want to get serious with it, you can use that page as a content pillar through which you distribute internal links to other key pages on your website that you also want to rank for those keywords. That effort will help buoy other pages on your website up in the search engine results pages (SERPs), creating new organic traffic streams for them.

No need to thank me.

Get Started Answering User Queries for Better SEO, Watch Rankings Improve

Hopefully you found these tips for answering user queries for better SEO helpful, and can put them into practice sooner rather than later. Though I can’t guarantee that any specific, individual efforts will bear fruit, I know from firsthand experience that the techniques covered in this post are effective.

And, if you have any questions, call one of our eCommerce SEO experts at 888-982-8269.

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