Some of the best companies started out as small businesses, but the trouble now-a-days is that it is super hard to find a small business on google. If you look up restaurants near you, it will show you all of the huge fast food franchises, mega sit-down restaurant chains, and a million other restaurants that bring in millions of dollars a year, but at the very bottom of that list you will find all the mom-and-pop shops, all the corner café’s and all the hole in the wall places. So how does a small business owner make sure that they can be found side by side with the large, mega-million companies? Read on to learn about ranking your business on Google.

The PAA Box

First let’s discuss what these are and how they can help with ranking your business on Google. These are the ‘People Also Ask’ boxes you frequently see when you look something up on Google. They show related websites, restaurants, and/or answers. When users click these boxes it provides them with a wide variety of brands that have the information they are looking for and they may click on the link to then go find out more information. The intent is usually shown through the words they uses.

These boxes provide brands and business with a very crucial spot for visibility on the results page. This helps businesses that don’t usually appear on the first page show up in a very crucial spot. It will take their link and use that as an answer for one of these many related questions that pop up when you look something up. The PAA box provides an understanding into the questions users may have about your products and company. This information can tell you what kind of content Google is deciding is important to show users and it shows you who your competitors are.

How to Get into the PAA Box

The data used to figure out which content serve as answers in the PAA box are just part of Google’s algorithms, meaning we can’t exactly know. Luckily, the patterns suggest that if you provide a good user experience that can definitely help you end up in a PAA box. In the article The explosion of PAA: Answering questions is the new way to dominate search, Ryan Johnson provided some of the following guidance:

• Write complete questions and answers. Make sure that each question is asked and fully answered.
• Use plain, common language.
• Avoid sales language.
• Add a Question and Answer section

You should try to be as straightforward, yet correct, as possible. To further take advantage of the expanding nature of the PAA box, consider adding a couple follow up questions and answers also. This could help your business not just appear in Google, but be on there multiple times which could greatly help your business. While organizing your pages does not guarantee that you could end up in a PAA listing, adding structured data, such as questions, question and answer pages, or FAQ and How-to pages, can help search engines figure out what your pages are about. This may help them surface for relevant queries.