Over the past two weeks Google has been making significant changes to the SERP feature landscape. We’ve seen fluctuations with many SERP features — local packs, images, and shopping results in particular — but most notably, there was a sharp decline (and now full return) of “People also ask” boxes in STAT.
While we did see a slight dip on mobile SERPs around the same time, it seems that desktop SERPs were disproportionately affected. The number of desktop PAAs in our database dropped from roughly two million to just under 10 thousand. With such small numbers, it’s likely that you have been seeing no desktop PAAs returning for your site.
When we checked to see whether a code change on Google’s end had interfered with our parser’s ability to recognize the “People also ask” box, we found that there were almost no PAAs on our raw HTML SERPs to even parse. It seemed that Google had simply gotten rid of them.
However, to complicate matters, “People also ask” boxes were still showing up on 10-result desktop SERPs — and disappearing or being replaced with other SERP features when the length of the SERP was increased.
Since most searchers don’t adjust their Google settings from the default 10-result SERP, there was some speculation that this change was meant to prevent SEO tools from scraping PAA questions because most of the industry pulls 50-100 result SERPs (STAT pulls the full 100).
But, with so much SERP feature fluctuation, it’s been extremely difficult to tell whether this was a punitive move by Google or simply part of a larger SERP feature shake-up that has yet to fully materialize. Even over the course of summarizing the situation here, PAAs have now made a full return to the 100-result desktop SERP.
Whether they stick around remains to be seen, so we will continue to monitor the situation, and be sure to update you on any further changes we see.
Should desktop PAAs disappear again, you can use mobile PAAs as a decently reliable approximation for your desktop keywords. Historically, mobile and desktop PAAs appear at roughly the same rates and often house many of the same questions.
Our People Also Ask report will bring you every question appearing in your smartphone (and now desktop again) PAAs, along with their source URL and rank within the box.
If you’re not tracking on mobile yet, now is always a great time to start. Not only are the majority of searches performed on mobile devices (over 60% of searches in the US), but Google typically operates with a mobile-first design philosophy.
The easiest way to get started is to head to the Upload Keywords tab and download the keyword upload template with your site’s existing keywords.
Make sure you change the device to “smartphone” and add “- mobile” to the end of your tag names so you don’t disrupt the data in your current desktop tags. It’s also a good idea to add a separate “mobile” tag for all your new mobile keywords to gather in so you can chart their collective performance. Then simply re-upload that spreadsheet to STAT to get them tracking.
If you have any questions or concerns, or would like to share any thoughts you may have on the “People also ask” box or recent SERP changes, please feel free to reach out to your account manager or send us an email to support@getstat.com.
Cheers,
The STAT team