Mark from Also Asked explains when to split questions into separate pages versus combining them. Broad topics like "puppy training" generate unrelated questions that need separate articles, while narrow topics like "how to toilet train a dog" produce closely related questions you can answer together. Focus on user intent, not keyword lists.
Chapters
Hi there, Mark from Also Asked here, and I want to answer one of the most common questions we get to Also Asked, which is, should I make separate pages for questions or combine into a single page? Now, with many things in SEO, you might not be surprised to know the answer is, it depends. But what does it depend on? The first thing to think about is how broad your initial search term is. So let's look at an example. If we start with the example of the search for puppy training, this is quite a broad term, and this will be reflected in the type of questions we get. So puppy training to me is really like a topic rather than maybe an article that you would write. And the type of questions we get are like, what are the golden rules of training? What's the best age to start? What are the 5 commands for puppy training? How many minutes a day should we train our puppy? So I would say these are probably going to be separate articles. They're separate intent. So if you want to know what the 5 basic commands are, you might not really be interested in knowing the detail of how many minutes a day you should be looking at training your puppy. When we start to get deeper in this tree though, and we get to very specific things, so how do we toilet train a dog, for instance, if we explored that tree, you'll see all of the questions here are of course very related to something very specific. So how do we stop a dog from peeing and pooping in the house? How long does it take to train a dog? Can you train a dog to use pee pads and go outside? It would make sense to answer all of these questions on an article or a video or a podcast, whatever it is, your content about how do you toilet train a dog. So how broad the query is will normally define how closely related these questions are and whether they should be on the same page or separate pages. The other really important consideration is, and the way of actually just the overarching way of looking at this, is think about intent rather than specific questions. Don't fall into the trap of thinking you must answer every one of these questions on your page, or even that you need to write the question out. It doesn't work like that. You just need to make sure that that intent is covered in your content. I'll show you what I mean by that by jumping back to this example. So we've got a couple of questions here about how long does it take to toilet train a dog, almost an identical question there. What is the quickest way to toilet train a dog? What you're seeing is connected to this, how do you toilet train a dog query? A lot of the intent is around how long will it take? So you just need to talk about that in your article. You don't need to just list these questions. There's other interesting related questions here, such as, what is the hardest dog to potty train? So these are questions around which variables affect how long the process takes. So what I would do with this in terms of content is actually We say, okay, we're writing this article about how to toilet train a dog. We need a section about how long it takes, what variables can affect this, and then continue this process of thinking about intent as we go along. So there's questions here about whether you should use pee pads. So there's specific questions then about what products can I use to achieve this goal? So remember, this is what people are searching for. They're trying to achieve this goal, and there are specific things they're trying to find out about achieving this goal, and it makes sense to put them all in the same place. So, what smells repels dogs from pooping? Why do little dogs maybe poo and pee in the house? What age is best to toilet train? So again, there's a whole section there about— you could write about maybe it's beneficial to train them when they are puppies, but if you get a rescue dog that's older, is it still possible to train them at an older age? This is what the intent looks like. This is how you make good content briefs. And just by focusing on the user, you can ensure you get the best possible results. Hopefully this made sense to you. AI is still very bad at doing this job. It's a very human-based job to do. The last tip I'd give you is don't worry about answering the same question in more than one place. Answer the questions where it makes sense to. So you may have an overview article that touches on how long it might take to train a dog not to pee indoors, but then that links to the article where you've got more in-depth information about that process, how you can speed it up, average times, how it varies by breed or how you're training, etc. So really focus on the user. Don't focus on keywords, focus on the search intent, and you will do really well.
