[Journey] Building An Authority Website Using PAA - No Keyword Research - No Link Building

I've been meaning to try something out for a while but haven't gotten around to it.

Because keyword research is the most difficult aspect of ranking without links, I wanted to develop a way that didn't require a lot of effort.

The PAA part of the SERP, in my opinion, is the best place to start. The PAA section is likely the only place where you can find Google-generated keywords instead of actual queries typed into the search box.

Why is Google suggesting those questions if no one is typing them into Google? No idea. But it probably has something to do with relevance.

So I've decided to test it out.

Here's the plan for the journey:

1. Select a topic
2. Scrape the PAA section
3. Publish the articles
4. Wait and see what happens

I've finished steps 1 and 2.

Step 1 is simple. Nothing much to talk about there. I picked a topic in the food niche.

For Step 2, I used a chrome extension called SEO Minion. I entered the head term into google and selected the 8 Levels PAA option in the extension. I ended up with around 2000 keywords after the run was complete. After getting rid of duplicates and irrelevant terms, I have a list of around 500 keywords.

Step 3: I've decided to use the Sensit tool by @Cognitive to take of the content for me. I don't have the time or interest to do this manually. I'll be sending over the order info shortly and all the articles should be ready in a few days. Once they're ready, I'll upload them to WP and schedule them to publish over 3 months.

Then we wait.

It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out. Because they aren't actual keywords that people type into Google, the exact keywords I'm using are unlikely to have any search volume. They do, however, have a section on the SERP. It may lead to some decent traffic.

As always, I'll share the traffic and progress each month. Since I'm doing this journey to test out a concept, I won't be sharing any income or expenses.

Has anyone here tried this before? Were you happy with the outcome?

Good luck and following along. Over the last couple of years I've moved towards doing traditional keyword research less and less and more towards using PAS/PAA/Autocomplete etc. data.

I guess probably aware of this tool but if not then check it out (and anyone else if they want solid keywords):


If one could target a pretty narrow niche and cover like 100+ PAA topics (I've been meaning to try one of those topic cluster tools) they'd build a serious amount of topical authority. Bonus if you're not really competing with anyone which is doable in some verticals. You can establish a national brand with very little competition and have a lot of fun dominating.

warriorsam53 said:

irrelevant terms,

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You did this manually?

Wow! This tool is so much better. Lol. It took like 8 hours with that extension.

I've been using autocomplete for a few years now. This is my first experiment using just PAA.

Shaybib said:

You did this manually?

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Yeah pretty much. But I used filters in excel. Didn't take too long.

Your journeys are always interesting, and I've learned a lot from you!

Good luck man, but you won't need it as you have the skills!

Holzr said:

Good luck and following along. Over the last couple of years I've moved towards doing traditional keyword research less and less and more towards using PAS/PAA/Autocomplete etc. data.

I guess probably aware of this tool but if not then check it out (and anyone else if they want solid keywords):

People Also Ask Tool | SearchResponse.io

Content and Keyword Research Platform

searchresponse.io

If one could target a pretty narrow niche and cover like 100+ PAA topics (I've been meaning to try one of those topic cluster tools) they'd build a serious amount of topical authority. Bonus if you're not really competing with anyone which is doable in some verticals. You can establish a national brand with very little competition and have a lot of fun dominating.

Click to expand...

This tool is a real gem! I just gave it a try, and I'm impressed!

Can you recommend a tool for topic clustering as well?

Royal96 said:

Your journeys are always interesting, and I've learned a lot from you!

Good luck man, but you won't need it as you have the skills!



This tool is a real gem! I just gave it a try, and I'm impressed!

Can you recommend a tool for topic clustering as well?

Click to expand...

Not tried any so can't recommend anything at the moment.

I hope your project becomes successful. This journey will let us know if it's good to target PAA keywords instead of relying on keyword research tools.

I think I know why you are trying this.

Have to admit, I was thinking the same thing the last few days.

You basically want to replicate those big websites, but remain niche relevant, and answer the questions with your own text.

Seems you beat me to it, I'll wait for the results in case I don't decide to do it myself too.

In theory, you should see success 100%. It just depends on what scale.

You would still need the intro though, at least from my pov.

Holzr said:

Good luck and following along. Over the last couple of years I've moved towards doing traditional keyword research less and less and more towards using PAS/PAA/Autocomplete etc. data.

I guess probably aware of this tool but if not then check it out (and anyone else if they want solid keywords):

People Also Ask Tool | SearchResponse.io

Content and Keyword Research Platform

searchresponse.io

If one could target a pretty narrow niche and cover like 100+ PAA topics (I've been meaning to try one of those topic cluster tools) they'd build a serious amount of topical authority. Bonus if you're not really competing with anyone which is doable in some verticals. You can establish a national brand with very little competition and have a lot of fun dominating.

Click to expand...

Thanks for this, so useful mate, and good luck OP will be following

Alexion said:

I think I know why you are trying this.

Have to admit, I was thinking the same thing the last few days.

You basically want to replicate those big websites, but remain niche relevant, and answer the questions with your own text.

Seems you beat me to it, I'll wait for the results in case I don't decide to do it myself too.

In theory, you should see success 100%. It just depends on what scale.

You would still need the intro though, at least from my pov.

Click to expand...

Im not sure which big sites you’re referring to. So far, I haven’t even checked a single keyword so I don’t even know what other sites I’ll be competing with.

I’m just publishing an article for every PAA question for the sub topic I selected.

What sort of an intro? You mean to the article?

Hey @warriorsam53 great journey.
One question: How are the articles structured? Because most of the PAAs don't really require a seperate article for answering that query, so do you include multiple PAAs in one article or do you only target those where you can write a complete article?

Can you give a simple template of the article?

Good luck!

I have great tool and better way to do it. It can generate 10k articles a day. been trying for 8 months now. got great results

RealDaddy said:

Hey @warriorsam53 great journey.
One question: How are the articles structured? Because most of the PAAs don't really require a seperate article for answering that query, so do you include multiple PAAs in one article or do you only target those where you can write a complete article?

Can you give a simple template of the article?

Good luck!

Click to expand...

That's what I'm wondering as well.

I often find really good questions, but there's not much to add. If I would answer other questions, there might be some overlapping causing keyword cannibalization.

Sometimes, I see other low authority competitors doing this: They write an article about "X vs Y" and they have subheadings like "How does X work?" and "How does Y work?" This makes the article pretty lengthy which is nice, but it doesn't feel like the right structure.

What do you think?

RealDaddy said:

Hey @warriorsam53 great journey.
One question: How are the articles structured? Because most of the PAAs don't really require a seperate article for answering that query, so do you include multiple PAAs in one article or do you only target those where you can write a complete article?

Can you give a simple template of the article?

Good luck!

Click to expand...

There’s no template and tbh, I don’t know what the articles will look like. lol.

Im using the Sensit autopilot tool. So each article will be between 800-1200 words. I guess it’ll be an intro and a few headings. But it’s not something I’ve explicitly requested.

I’ll manually add a google snippet optimised paragraph to the pages that get traffic/impressions. I’m not going to bother editing the rest of them.

I’m targeting 1 PAA question per article. IMO, multiple PAA questions don’t belong on the same page.

I also want to have as many articles about the topic as possible for topical relevance.

In case pages start cannibalising keywords when they start ranking, I’ll take care of it based on search console data.

I hope that makes sense.

backlinkindexer said:

I have great tool and better way to do it. It can generate 10k articles a day. been trying for 8 months now. got great results

Click to expand...

Great. That’s good to know. I’d appreciate it if you could share any insights you have.

All the best.

following and thinking of starting a similar website

I'm looking forward to your feedback about the quality of the articles generated with the Sensit autopilot module. When the quality is even just half decent at this scale, it could be a great way to quickly create a whole site. Then after some time when you see what ranks, the articles which are getting the most traffic can be optimized further, either with AI or manually.

It 100% works btw, that's what a lot of AI-generated sites do, they scrape PAA snippets and just paraphrase them and repost.
Some of them have millions of monthly visitors so yea definitely works, let's see if it's worth doing in smaller scale though

spectrejoe said:

It 100% works btw, that's what a lot of AI-generated sites do, they scrape PAA snippets and just paraphrase them and repost.
Some of them have millions of monthly visitors so yea definitely works, let's see if it's worth doing in smaller scale though

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Yeah, I see them all over the place. Do you know which tools these sites are using, or you think it's custom coded?

+ A lot of them don't even paraphrase. They just mix different snippets, and make a "unique" article out of it.