An FAQ page is a place on a website where commonly asked questions are answered. Having an FAQ page can be highly beneficial for your site because it demonstrates to users and search engines that you are actively trying to benefit the user.
A well-written FAQ section is an excellent way to show your online customers that you are happy to help and care about their custom. It shows that you as a business are able to effectively understand and respond to your customer needs.
A FAQ page also improves your SEO rankings, as Google values your website based on the information you give to the user, so it’s important to have one in place on your site.
Why create an FAQ page?
An FAQ page has many benefits to your site, the first being that it shows you are listening to your customer needs and ensuring they don’t have trouble with getting in touch or having simple questions answered.
A well-optimized FAQ page can:
- Decrease your customer support team’s workload by making your FAQ page will be the first point of call for the answers they need.
- Shorten your customer buying journey. If your users can find all the answers without having to contact your customer service team, they will feel looked after and be more likely to make a purchase.
- Building trust among your users and with Google by covering important information such as return policies and shipping processes.
It’s worth mentioning the need to implement voice search as part of your FAQ strategy, as many users use devices like Alexa, Siri, and Google hubs. Reports show that 20% of all searches are voice related. If your FAQ page is well-optimized, it should be able to answer common questions asked through voice search.
Collect relevant FAQs
If you want to know how to create an FAQ page, there are a few initial steps you must take.
Firstly, it’s important to raise the right questions and educate your online customers about your products or service. You will need to research, plan, and do strategic work to find out what your customers most commonly asked questions are. If you have a support centre or customer service reps, they should be the first people you speak to. You can easily find out what your customer regularly asks and what they are looking for when you speak to those who communicate with customers the most.
Collecting customer and visitor feedback is good practice for improving any business. Online survey tools can help you create an online questionnaire and identify any issues or points your customers may have, providing your content with unique data and insights. This will help you create answers to their burning questions.
Check your competitors’ FAQ pages and product reviews for items in your niche and look closer at what they are doing and what questions they answer that you haven’t. If they sell similar products or services, the chances are your customers will have similar (if not the same) queries as theirs.
Implement structured data
To ensure you become more visually appealing in the SERP, you will need to add structured data to your FAQ pages. This will pull you ahead of your competition of the same niche. Once implanted, you can make your content more eligible to appear in questions and answers on Google, or even earn a featured snippet.
FAQ’s can be used for single pages, which provide official questions and answers.
Don’t be confused with the Q&A page markup that is designed for forum sites like Quora, where content is user generated and users can submit their own answers to questions.
Think visually
Using an image is sometimes a better way to explain things and grab your customers’ attention. Don’t just limit your answers to text — use stunning and well-designed images, graphics, and illustrations to add a more visual appeal to your FAQ page.
Images also make it easier for visitors to get clear answers to their questions. For example, if you provide a set of instructions or details on ‘how-to,’ you can use screenshots to guide customers through it step-by-step. They help people break up big chunks of text and improve their understanding.
Navigational structure
Providing your FAQ section with a clear structure will improve your site’s customer satisfaction, loyalty, and SEO performance.
Regardless of how well-written your FAQ section is, it will only be successful if your users can find or activate your site. If you opt for longer FAQ pages, many categories, and subcategories, consider ways to shorten the number of search results. It keeps users from clicking through your knowledge base for too long to find the right answer to their question.
It’s a good idea to divide questions into categories and lead to informative subheadings. For example, shipping, sizing, features, and other key details help to break things down a little bit.
Check analytics on a regular basis
Once your FAQ page is created and ready, you should start with your website analytics to see whether the page is getting any traffic and ranking for valuable keywords.
Ask yourself the following questions to help receive those great results:
- Are users visiting your FAQ page, or are they going by?
- How long do they stay?
- Where do they go after looking at the FAQ page?
- What paths are they taking?
Check how long visitors are on your FAQ page. Getting actionable insights means you can add minor changes or rework your page to direct visitors to the FAQs.
FAQ schema
Google loves featuring clear answers, so a well-optimized FAQ page will be more likely to show on that first page of the SERP when answering a user’s question. Because good FAQ pages are so beneficial, the content has a separate schema type: FAQ Page schema. It makes your FAQ page easier to understand for Google and helps your page stand out in the search, so should be effectively applied to benefit your FAQ SEO strategy.
Conclusion
Your FAQ page is an essential step in the buying journey and an excellent organic search asset that can bring in and convert traffic.
Ensure you create concise, factual answers that provide immediate help or guidelines. Including great visuals, such as videos and animated GIFs, will also contribute to making the FAQ section more helpful.
Ensure you link from your FAQ page to accommodate different user intents and help your site users continue their user journey. Good FAQ pages are structured in a clear and meaningful way, so users know what topics these sections cover, such as refunds, exchanges etc.
Monitor your site and follow user journeys through your FAQ pages to improve and expand it. When you have researched all the questions people are asking, map them to the relevant keywords and add them to an FAQ page which will provide you with SEO success. To ensure you have created a helpful FAQ page, answer relevant questions that both humans and search engines understand.