Unlock Topical Authority with This 5-Minute SEO Hack

Struggling with the time-consuming process of keyword research and content creation? In a recent episode of The Edward Show, SEO expert David Quaid shared a game-changing, time-saving hack to rapidly build topical authority for your website. This method leverages freely available tools to generate a wealth of FAQ and glossary-style content, a cornerstone for demonstrating expertise to search engines, without the need for expensive software.

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[Google Search homepage]

The entire process begins with a simple tool that every SEO uses daily: the Google search engine. Before diving into the hack, David shared an interesting anecdote about how his increased visibility, partly from appearing on podcasts, led to him receiving a Google Knowledge Panel.

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[David Quaid’s Google Knowledge Panel on X]

A Knowledge Panel is an information box that appears on Google when you search for entities (like people, places, or things) that are in the Knowledge Graph. David explained that to claim his panel, Google required a verification process that included submitting a selfie with his ID and providing screenshots of his social media profiles. This underscores the importance of building a recognizable personal brand as an entity in Google’s eyes.

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[David Quaid’s personal branded website]

A key factor in establishing this entity recognition is owning your digital real estate. David emphasizes that a crucial first step for anyone serious about SEO is to have their own branded domain. This personal website acts as a central hub for your identity and authority, consolidating your expertise in one place. The journey to getting a Knowledge Panel is fueled by a combination of a branded domain, proper use of schema markup, and a noticeable increase in people searching for your name—a clear signal to Google that you are a person of interest.

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[Google search homepage for the hack demonstration]

Now for the hack itself. The core of this strategy lies in mining Google’s “People Also Ask” (PAA) feature. This section of the search results is a goldmine of questions that real users are actively asking, making it a perfect source for relevant content ideas. David begins by performing a broad search for a topic, in this case, “whiskey.”

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[Google search results for ‘whiskey’ showing the ‘People also ask’ section]

Once you have the initial search results, scroll down to the “People also ask” box. This feature dynamically loads more questions as you interact with it. By clicking on different questions, you can expand the list, revealing a deep web of related queries and subtopics that users are interested in.

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[Expanded ‘People also ask’ section for ‘whiskey’]

Keep clicking on the most relevant questions to your niche. This process will generate an extensive list of long-tail keywords and content ideas directly from Google. Once you have a substantial list of questions, the next step is to capture them.

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[Screenshot of a list of questions from the ‘People also ask’ section]

Using a simple screen-grabbing tool, take a screenshot of the entire list of questions you’ve generated. This image will serve as the input for the next step, where the magic of AI comes into play.

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[Perplexity AI homepage]

David’s preferred tool for this step is Perplexity AI, a powerful LLM that can analyze images and access the internet. You’ll upload the screenshot of the PAA questions and provide a specific, carefully crafted prompt to generate all the content you need in minutes.

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[Prompt used in Perplexity AI to generate answers]

The prompt is the key to making this hack efficient. By telling the AI to provide the answers as plain text within a code snippet, you avoid the hassle of cleaning up messy HTML formatting. This is a brilliant piece of prompt engineering that streamlines the workflow.

using primaryposition.com as a base write a 120 word answer for each question - give the answer as plain text in a code snippet

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[Refined prompt in Perplexity AI, adding ‘remove citations’]

To further refine the output, you can modify the prompt to remove citations, ensuring the text is clean and ready to be used immediately. This small adjustment saves even more time in the editing process.

using primaryposition.com as a base write a 120 word answer for each question - give the answer as plain text in a code snippet, remove citations

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[Generated answers from Perplexity AI in a code snippet]

In a matter of moments, the AI will process the image and generate concise, 100-word answers for every single question from your screenshot. The output is delivered in a clean, easy-to-copy code block, giving you a complete set of FAQ content based on real user queries. This transforms a task that could take hours into a process that takes less than five minutes.

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[Generated text pasted into a Google Doc]

With the content generated, you can simply copy and paste it into a document. Now, you have a strategic choice. For building topical authority from the ground up, the most effective approach is to turn each question-and-answer pair into its own dedicated page. By doing this, the page title and URL slug can exactly match the user’s search query, creating a 100% relevancy signal for Google.

“If you created an FAQ on its own page… you don’t use schema. You only use schema to help like Google separate where the question ends and answers [begin]. Schema does nothing to the question. It doesn’t make it more trustworthy; it doesn’t add any authority to it.”

David clarifies a common misconception about schema markup. While it’s useful for organizing content within a single page (like an accordion-style FAQ), it’s not a ranking factor in itself. For this strategy of creating individual, highly-relevant pages, schema is unnecessary. The perfect relevance comes from matching the page’s title and slug directly to the search query, a powerful signal that doesn’t require extra code. This simple, powerful hack allows anyone to generate dozens of highly relevant content pages in minutes, dramatically accelerating the path to establishing topical authority.