In collaboration with SEMRUSH, we’ve decided to post the findings of the People Also Search For Study. It will cover the People Also Search For (PASF) Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page) feature (data collected in the USA in April 2021).
While we were analysing the ‘People Also Search For’ feature, we saw it is used mostly on desktop; only about 0.5% of mobile SERPs have it. Our estimate (based on 1M random keywords from the Semrush database) is that 93% of Google desktop SERPs have PASF boxes on them.
Different types of PASF features in search results
We found multiple variations of PASF features:
- A box placed at the end of the Google search results:
- A box visible under an organic result – we will call this type Organic PASF:
This type of PASF box appears when a user clicks on a result and then goes back to the SERP. It can imply that the user didn’t find the information that they were looking for.
- PASF in Knowledge Panel/Related queries block. You can also see a similar type of PASF on mobile SERPs:
- PASF in Ads, which looks organic but is placed for URLs that are ads. In our dataset, only PASF boxes in top Ads were noticed:
Methodology and main discoveries
In our research, we focus on the PASF boxes that occur for some links (organic ones). They make up the majority of our dataset.
We collected 129K desktop SERPs with PASF boxes and had a closer look at them.
- Overall PASF boxes occurred 1.4M times (on average 11 times for each SERP).
- 1.2M (82%) of these boxes were connected to organic URLs.
- 196k (14%) were the old PASF boxes that show up at the end of SERP.
- 56k (4%) were PASF boxes in top Ads.
- 6.3k (0.4%) were PASF boxes in the Knowledge Panel.
- 229 (0.02%) were PASF boxes in the Related topics block.
As for the distribution of different types among the analysed SERPs, we found that:
- PASF boxes at the bottom of the SERP are present for all of the SERPs
- Organic PASF boxes – 99.3%
- PASF boxes in Top Ads – 20%
- PASF boxes in Knowledge Panel – 4.9%
- PASF boxes in Related – 0.2%
Organic People Also Search For Box
We analysed more than 1.2M PASF boxes and 95% of them had appeared in organic results. Most of the PASF boxes are found in the top 10 positions; on average a box had 6 suggested keywords.
Keywords analysis
Each keyword shows between 1 and 13 desktop organic PASF boxes, 42% of keywords show 10 boxes, while 99% of the keywords show more than 5 organic PASF boxes.
The longest keyword in the desktop dataset has 44 words, the shortest has 1; the average keyword contains 3 words – these numbers are also typical for the general search keyword trends. Only 0.06% of the keywords are more than 10 words long. We didn’t find any correlation between keyword length and number of PASF boxes in a SERP.
Related queries
After dropping duplicate PASF boxes for each keyword in our dataset, we see that only 6% of the keywords have more than one unique PASF box.
We also found that the most popular suggested keyword is google seo checker, which is shown for 251 queries from our dataset. The search query with the most unique suggested keywords in our dataset is ‘time monitoring app’. It showed the highest number of PASF boxes and 78 suggested keywords (72 of them were unique).
Key takeaways from the study
Since there is a PASF box at the end of the page in 100% of analyzed SERPs, it might be helpful to check these keywords and try to rank for them also.
For instance, if you rank in the top 10 for Jennifer Lopez, check if you also rank for ‘Jennifer Lopez age’, ‘boyfriend’ etc.
At the same time, we see that 94% of the boxes are repeated – this means that it doesn’t really matter what you have on your website, or which information – the box will be the same if you are in the top 10 results.
Make full use of this Google SERP feature to find new keyword opportunities, map your keywords and develop your content to cover multiple topics. Keep an eye on any other query suggestions such as the People Also Ask box Google’s search engine has for your topics and take these into account when optimizing your content. There’s a lot of knowledge to be found in the search result, which can later be utilized for keyword research.
