Google’s algorithm updates have slowly but continuously moved to prioritize high-qualiton-site content. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone: it’s what searchers are looking for and it’s the hardest thing to fake. Marketers therefore need to take advantage of every opportunity to deliver more high-value content to their audiences.
For companies selling products and services, one of the easiest opportunities to expand your relevant content is to create FAQs. Nevertheless, many brands overlook this easy SEO opportunity which simultaneously creates value for your audience via content marketing and can improve lead generation and sales for your own business.
FAQs take very little effort: your customers do most of the thinking for you. In your day-to-day sales and support operations, customers ask questions continually. All you need to do is document those questions and their answers, put it on your website, and you’ve created an FAQ.
Best Practices for Creating FAQs
It isn’t hard to create a good, user-friendly FAQ that adds to your site’s user experience while improving your SEO. Here are a few tips to follow when creating your FAQ:
Talk to your sales and / or support teams about the questions that they are getting from customers to ensure your FAQ answers questions that your customers actually have.
Try to select questions which are applicable to many different people. Questions that are relatively niche and would not be relevant to many people may create clutter and make your FAQ too unmanageable for your users to navigate.
Keep your answers simple and to the point. This will make your FAQ more manageable and digestible to the readers.
It is often easy to end up with too much FAQ content. Don’t feel the need to include everything! User experience is more important than SEO; don’t allow your FAQ to fluster your audience because there is too much of it.
Use design tools such as accordions and anchor links to help improve UX. For very long and in-depth FAQs, you may want to consider making it searchable.
Keep FAQ content on the page of the product / service it pertains to whenever possible. Forcing people to navigate away from the page to access FAQ content is neither a good navigational experience nor the best for SEO.
If you do have a long FAQ section, try to keep the most important and / or broadly relevant information towards the top, where it will be more likely to be seen.
Examples
Microsoft 365’s FAQ page is a very good example of how to take a large quantity of FAQ content and make it manageable. While Microsoft obviously has a ton of resources at its disposal, its FAQ page is very straightforward and this style could be replicated by any company. It simply makes use of categories with anchor links leading to lists of questions that are expandable via accordions.
For a good example of an FAQ from a small business, take a look at one of Homogenizers.net’s FAQs which they put directly on their product pages, improving the SEO of those high-value pages specifically. They have a separate tab within the product descriptions for their FAQs so they are not in the way of the user’s navigation and UX, but are still clearly noticeable. However, within the FAQ tab, there are no aids to help users find the information which may be of value to them. The only way to see what questions are answered is to scroll through the entire Q&A.. This is non-ideal for pages which have a lot of questions and / or questions with long answers, as users may get scroll fatigue and not see the content closer to the bottom.
This also highlights a situation where FAQs are very important. Resellers or distributors often lack a lot of unique content, since product information is often a near-duplicate of what is found on manufacturers’ websites. FAQs, as well as reviews and mechanisms for generating unique content, are therefore invaluable to these types of companies.
Summary
FAQs provide value to your website visitors through easily-accessed content which preempts their questions
FAQs provide value to brands through improved SEO.
FAQs are easy to create: just document your customers’ questions and their respective answers
Keep the answers concise and to the point
Ensure your FAQ has enough organization and navigation aids to provide a good UX
To boost the SEO of your most important pages, try to put FAQs directly on the pages for your products and services