I created a platform that has 2 parts that are strongly connected with each other. The first part is a blog, the second part is a community Q&A system were users can ask and answer questions. Both parts of the site link to each other. Viewing a blog article about door handles for example will show related questions about door handles under it. Same for the Q&A pages. The site is rather new, it's around 6 months old, so there isn't really and answer I can get from the data at them moment. The question is if it's even worth investing time in the Q&A side of the site, or if I should focus just, or mainly, on the blog articles? With the articles I can go more in depth about topics and answer multiple questions in one article, and with the Q&A posts I am answering very specific questions at a time, short and to the point, but can also go into more detail, which I feel could be a good ranking factor. What do you all think is better? Thanks!
I would focus on the blog and add the Q&A's below the article. Add the Q&A schema for the SERP's. See attachment for how they'd show up. You can also enable comments to answer additional questions. There are SEO benefits for allowing comments but they would need to be moderated for spam.
Both the blog and Q&A pages have schema, and in every blog post, there are questions and answers that are related to the blog post under it. Both the blog and Q&A pages have comments enabled which are moderated, as are the questions and answers that are submitted by the users. My main question is, if I have limited amount of time and can either write 10 Q&As, or 4 blog posts, which would have a greater impact given the following: 1. The 4 blog posts would have an overall same word count as the 10 Q&As 2. The blog posts and the Q&As would both cover the same topics and provide the same information 3. The blog post would have images, the Q&A would not 4. In 1 blog post, there would be the same amount of information that 2 or 3 Q&As would have So the blog posts just have images, and would combine the information from multiple Q&As into one article. While the Q&As don't have images, and would each be very specific to the asked question. Which has a greater impact?
There is such a thing as - the reverse answer. If you have this back answer, then you can see the full picture of your activities and move in the right direction. Limiting yourself in communicating with your audience is absolutely not the right step in my opinion.
Hi, sorry, I don't understand what you mean. What is the reverse answer, and back answer? And in what way am I limiting myself in communicating with my audience?
I understand that you do not want to waste time on questions and answers on the site. I think that it is necessary to spend time on this, it is very necessary and useful for the development of the site.
Ok, right, I agree with this. The reason I am asking this is because it's also something that I have been wondering ever since I first created my platform, but also, I have a few questions that answer a very specific topic, and I recently also wrote a blog article on the same subject, answering the same questions, and the blog article is performing much better, even though it's only been less than 1 month since the article was published. There are quite a few questions answering the same questions as in the article and they were published way before the article, but they are not even ranking on the first few pages. The article is in pos 2 on average. So it makes me wonder how useful these Q&A pages actually are for SEO in comparison to blog posts.
For SEO, this also matters in my opinion. They increase the overall weight of the site for a specific request.
It sounds like you're creating more work than necessary and redundant. If your blog posts are thorough you shouldn't need additional Q&A pages. Blog posts will have better "search intent" than a bunch of semi related questions on a page. 1. Word count doesn't matter, the main goal is to satisfy the search intent, whether that takes 500 words or 1500. 2. Sounds redundant 3. Having images with alt text helps rankings 4. See #2
The problem I see is that if Google sees a question and answer it will just display the answer and not send the searcher to your website.
I have a personal, nonprofit, informational website. It has about 530 articles I have written, and it has zero Q&A. I can't thing of any reason I would add a Q&A section to those successful articles. They are bringing a total of about 65,000 unique visitors a month. I would not have the time to deal with Q&A. I give my writing time 100% to the articles. EDIT: I do have something that resembles a Q&A. It's a page where I pose the questions and I give the answers on topics I want to write about. So it's really a page that summarizes many topics with my giving a short answer to questions I have created.
All very good points, that really just increase the curiosity around it. There seems to be pros and cons for both ways. In your data, do you see if the Q&A pages help or contribute to your traffic, or page engagement in anyway? For my blog, I am now writing articles to cover specific topics for which the Q&A's already exist, and I can see that so far, based on 3 articles, they are taking over the traffic from the existing questions. I do wonder, though, if the user engagement will go down, since people reading blog articles largely tend to read and leave, while for Q&A pages, many times people will continue on to other similar questions, increasing user engagement.
The closest I have to a Q&A page is my "Frequently Asked Questions" page. Out of our website's total of 91,587 Page Views last month that page received only 10 page views. So basically zero traffic.