Don’t leave your customers guessing. You may have an impactful, detailed, and SEO-friendly website but with an FAQs page, you can answer nearly all your site visitors’ queries in one place.
Visitors will be happy and satisfied if they can have their queries answered immediately.
That goes for Google too. If you want to come high up in a Google search, answers please Google greatly.
FAQ pages can improve your site’s SEO and user experience, but FAQs have lots of benefits, including:
- Earning the trust of your customer
- Giving your site a competitive edge
- Freeing up your time from answering the same questions over and over
- Providing quick information to help customers make purchasing decisions
- Gaining authority and expert status in Google ‘snippets’ and ‘people always ask’
- Improving your business’s reputation with this simple customer service touchpoint
- Boosting sales in a shorter turnaround as customers can access all information needed
Let’s get optimising!
Which questions to answer
Start with a list of the most commonly asked questions asked by your customers and followers. Invite your team members to join in with adding to this list as they will know best which questions are asked of their departments most of all.
Your sales and customer services teams are a great place to start. They’re probably one of the first human touchpoints in the customer journey, and therefore likely to be asked a lot of questions.
Data should also influence the questions on your list. Audience research is beneficial at this early stage. Sift through your chat logs and conduct a customer survey. Google the industries your business operates in and record the questions that appear (known as ‘people always ask’ results). Read up in forums such as Quora and Reddit to see what others are discussing. Identify trends on social media platforms from TikTok to LinkedIn.
Stick to strategic, specific questions.
How to answer those questions:
Once you know your questions, answering them should be easy. But not necessarily. Every answer must be easy to understand, succinct, and straight to the point.
We’d recommend no more than three short paragraphs for each answer. Even less if possible. Feel you could write for days about that one question? Turn it into content for your blog.
Copy isn’t the only way to answer a question. You could include an explainer video, images, downloadable PDFs, or even a gif. It’s also important to use internal links within your answers to develop your SEO.
Ensure all answers are accurate, grammatically correct, and thoroughly proofread. FAQs are here to improve your reputation, not ruin it.
If many of the answers can already be found elsewhere on your site, rephrase them so that you’re not negatively impacting your already wonderful SEO.
WordPress users can add a plugin to your site to help markup your content with FAQ schema. This helps make your FAQs easier for Google to read and will increase your chances of being featured in Google snippets.
Where to store your FAQs
You tend to find FAQs hidden in a website’s footer, or in a page within a page. Google will find them easily but your visitors may not. Give them their own page specially formatted for maximum quality user experience. The more easily they can find and read your answers, the longer you’ll keep visitors on your site.
Unless you format your FAQs into an accordion (a drop-down list of questions with answers hidden within), your users will end up scrolling endlessly. If you can’t, or don’t want to use the accordion style, give each category of your FAQs a dedicated page.
Remember, you should be the primary source of information about your business. They can take time to format and optimise correctly, but if you dedicate your time to them, Google and your site users will reward you in the long run.