FAQ or frequently asked question pages assist in addressing common queries your clients are asking—and provide easy-to-understand solutions. But these critical web pages don’t just answer client questions. They can also be an essential search engine optimization (SEO) tool. There are eight factors to consider to build a FAQ that’s helpful for your site visitor and boosts your rank in search engine result pages (SERPs), there are eight factors to consider. In this article, we’ll outline how to create a FAQ by using service data from your website and finding what common questions your clients ask the most. And build a quality FAQ to boost your sales and strengthen your brand image.
What are FAQ pages, and why are they important?
Your FAQ page serves as your online customers’ initial point of contact before they actively contact you if you do it right. And a good FAQ page takes some of the burden off your customer care team and gets ahead of your clients’ questions. Ultimately, this benefits you and your team—and your prospective clients!
A good FAQ page boosts your site’s SEO. By including relevant keywords in the FAQ and linking to them from other pages on the website, FAQ pages can improve your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) and your rank in search engine results pages (SERPs).
A well-designed FAQ page is a helpful self-service tool for your site visitors. A good page allows users to find and review resources at their leisure. For larger businesses, this can ease the load on customer service teams. Plus, if visitors to your website obtain all the info they need without contacting your customer service team, they’ll be more likely to make purchases. This gives your company a competitive advantage.
11 Ways to create a well-optimised FAQ page
One of the easiest ways to identify common client questions and build a well-optimised FAQ page is to look at your customers carefully. This can be an excellent place to start if you have access to customer support data. Next, analyse the most frequently asked questions and use those as the foundation for your FAQ page.
With that info in hand, it’s time to get to work! Use the following 11 best practices to audit your existing FAQ page or as the framework to help you build a brand new one.
1. Conduct client and SEO research.
To determine which topics to build out on your site, audit current client questions and site data available to you. Take notes on any queries from potential clients via support tickets, social media, and customer service. Then compile a list of the most asked questions and arrange them according to importance.
Before starting your FAQ page content or structure, you must understand your client’s needs. Then, consider deploying an online survey to capture the most pressing questions. Popular online tools like SurveyMonkey or Survey Anywhere can uncover your audience’s problems and identify questions for you to answer.
Reviewing search keywords also informs what topics you should include in your FAQ page and helps you align your page content with your clients’ most searched-for questions. Leverage keyword research tools like SE Ranking to strengthen the content on your FAQ with the language your clients use to search for solutions. In addition to search volume, traffic cost, and keyword effectiveness index (KEI), SE Ranking also uses an algorithm to capture the most frequently used phrases in your niche questions. This data can significantly help you as you build and optimise your FAQ page content.
2. Outline key topics and questions.
Time to start mapping out question topics and thinking about how you’ll order them on your FAQ page. Place the most frequently asked questions first within each topic section. Then, lean into your initial research to identify those questions and topics.
3. Interlink your FAQ with other helpful site content.
Consider your FAQ page as a sitemap for your content. You have an opportunity to not only inform and connect readers with related content, products, or reviews throughout your website—you’re also building trust and growing client relationships.
Integrating and hyperlinking your existing and new content within your FAQ page builds out your EAT and grows your client base. Using language like “People also asked …” for your links helps readers recognize the value-add content and may make them more likely to click through. Robust content offerings also create even stronger FAQ pages by backing up your answers to all crucial search queries with next-step suggestions, how-tos, or product reviews.
4. Use H-tags to optimise and organise your content.
H-tags, or heading tags, is just one of the more than 200 ranking variables used by Google to rank your content in search engine result pages (or SERPs).
An HTML element used to define headings and subheadings on a webpage, H-tags are ranked across six levels, from H1 (closest to your title tag) to H6 (most relative to paragraph text). These tags add structure to the content on your pages, making it easier for users and search engines to scan.
Using H-tags to optimise FAQ page headers for clarity and organisation makes your content easily accessible and more scannable and provides visitors with a better editorial experience.
Although header tags aren’t the primary driver of high SEO results, they facilitate easier reading and scannability of your content. In addition, they provide an outline for your readers to follow. For example:
- H1 headers should capture the top-level overview of your page’s main topics.
- H2 -H6 headers ladder up to H1 headers and can be used to order and organise the critical points within your H1 theme. Use these lower-tier headers to summarise the ideas you will discuss.
What might this look like on a FAQ page? Let’s use the example of a clothing firm. The company may arrange the product title and other general subjects as larger H1s and organise product descriptions, specs, and customer evaluations as H2-H6 subheads.
Remember, using H1 through H-6 tags isn’t required for every page. Depending on your content, you may only need a couple of H1 tags. Only use them if it benefits the user’s experience. For example, when providing text-heavy pages, like FAQs, H-tags make the content easier to read, which is great for visitors and web crawlers. In addition, h-tag categorising improves the overall comprehension of your page material by search engines, positively impacting your SERP page rank.
5. Write FAQ content with EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) in mind.
Another remarkable benefit of FAQ pages is that they allow you to demonstrate your expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (or EAT).
EAT content is crucial in building positive relationships with clients and search engines, and Google’s experts consider EAT when assessing what constitutes a good-quality or bad-quality site. Use your FAQ page to demonstrate your expertise by providing clear, concise answers to inquiries regarding your company. Include Q&A about your company, too. For example, include relevant credentials, certifications, evaluations, and more.
For FAQs related to products and services, be sure your page includes hyperlinks to your company’s product offerings, customer reviews, and service descriptions. Creating dotted lines from your customer’s frequently asked questions directly to your company’s product and service solutions can drive more substantial conversions, and increase sales.
6. Implement structured data.
Thanks to a recent update, Google now supports FAQ structured data for search queries and Google Assistant. Structured data is the general format through which information is shared and classified on a page. A good example is a recipe: Most online recipes are formatted similarly and include a receipt title, description, ingredient list, and step-by-step how-to.
You can leverage this type of structured data on your FAQ page to improve the page’s visual attractiveness in the SERP, increase the average click-through rate, and outperform your niche competition.
Google’s new update and enhancement include a Search Console report that tracks any issues with the FAQ and search results. It shows all alerts, mistakes, and correct information on your FAQ pages.
FAQ structured data is useful for achieving better SEO optimization and helps Google to better understand the content published on your webpages. Plus, FAQ structured data is encoded inside the HTML of your website and is only viewed by Google, so it has no impact on what visitors see.
Your type of site CMS dictates how easy or difficult it may be to implement FAQ structured data. Although Google clearly states that it prefers JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation) structured data, they also support Microdata and RDFa.
Although Google has indicated there is no guaranteed boost related to the inclusion of structured data in your FAQ page, it may enhance your site’s CTR (click-through rate), increasing traffic to your website.
7. Use graphics on your page.
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words! Graphics or images are helpful tools for clarifying complex topics, catching people’s attention, and facilitating greater learning. To build out your FAQ page, look for opportunities beyond text answers. Use well-designed graphics, photos, drawings, or videos to give your FAQ page more visual appeal. Don’t forget to make your images SEO-friendly.
Photographs, charts, graphics, and screenshots help guide readers through step-by-step instructions and how-tos, making difficult instructions or concepts much easier to access and understand.
8. Build a strong navigational structure.
No matter how well-designed your FAQ section is, if customers can’t find it or navigate through your page—they’ll leave your site and never return.
Give your FAQ area a framework that allows visitors to read and move through your site quickly. Good navigation will provide a better user experience, build brand loyalty, and optimise your SEO. For example, suppose you’re able to seamlessly guide visitors to easy-to-understand answers and connect them quickly to product and service solutions. In that case, they’ll want to return to your website again and again.
Sometimes, your main FAQ page can be broken into subsequent FAQ pages. To reduce the number of search results and give your consumers the best options, consider this opportunity. For instance, shipping and ordering information could be housed on one FAQ page, product features on another, and company information on another.
Breaking up your navigational structure and connecting it to other content resources on your website helps your customers gain an accurate and in-depth understanding of your product and service offerings, your company’s expertise, and how other clients have found success with your services. This is also beneficial for SEO since it increases page visits, which Google analyses to determine the worth of your content.
9. Utilise internal linking.
There are more reasons to connect from your FAQ page and gain more links from your organic search listing. Each response on your FAQ page contributes to the customer experience and is a significant milestone in the sales process.
Consider this: What are your website visitors likely to do after using your FAQ page to answer a specific question?
Chances are, they’re looking for answers tied to a purchase decision they’re considering. So if you link them directly to a product or service solution from the related FAQ, you increase the chance of landing a sale. And you can build loyalty by also including links and information to your shipping FAQ, recent customer reviews, and more.
10. Use tabbed content according to drop-downs.
Contrary to what you may have heard, Google indexes and ranks information shown in tabs and accordions (or vertically stacked lists that may have their contents hidden or made visible by clicking).
Consider structuring your more complicated material into tabs or accordions to increase the SEO and readability of your FAQ page. In addition, this will give users more flexibility over how much content they consume at once.
For example, using accordions on lengthy, text-heavy FAQ pages makes the page much easier to read. In addition, to make it simpler to go through pertinent information, you may further organise your material inside the accordions with sub-headings or tabs.
Accordions are especially helpful on sites where visitors can only read some words to find the solution to their question. It is also easier to skip from section to section, allowing your readers to sift through other info on your FAQ page and click on only what they’re specifically looking for.
Finally, accordions are able to show a lot of information on a mobile device. Users sometimes give up scrolling far sooner on smaller screens if they can’t find what they’re looking for. Accordions can be easier for mobile users to read your webpage content easily. Plus, according to Google, accordion content has no adverse effects on mobile SEO or mobile-first indexing. Additionally, visitors are able to effortlessly skip from section to section to find what they’re searching for.
11. Monitor customer feedback.
Finally, obtaining user feedback on your FAQ answers produces more valuable responses. Track the feedback you may receive through comments, social media, and other channels. Use this information to add additional FAQs or build out existing knowledge.
Additionally, you can use positive feedback to market yourself on social media! Once more, many pre-built FAQ solutions have this feature, but there are also independent plugins available.
Final thoughts
Remember that Google prioritises the user, so planning your FAQ SEO page strategies with the user in mind will help you find success. Your website readers will appreciate and benefit from your ability to deliver concise and helpful FAQ pages. The tips shared here can help make your pages more accessible and valuable to your site visitors—and boost your site’s rank in search.
That’s a win-win in our book! Your readers will benefit from a well-laid out, easy-to-understand FAQ page—and you’ll reap the rewards of improved site SEO.