Enhancing your FAQ page for SEO, benefits your site in various ways, the most important of which is improved user experience and rankings. Whether your official site seems to have a FAQ page or you want to add one, these tips will help you improve it for SEO while keeping the user’s needs in mind. Many companies keep their FAQ pages in the footer or deep within the navigation bar. However, because FAQ pages hardly ever direct readers to clicks or list product details, they are usually ignored when it comes to optimization.
What is an FAQ page?
A Frequently Asked Questions page is the main section of a website that delivers information about fundamental user issues or queries. In addition, a variety of FAQs and answers in particular fields are set up for viewers to learn more. In terms of SEO, The goal of Q&A sections is not to attract more customers through marketing efforts; nevertheless, by answering their questions, these pages benefit in retaining customers and encourage them to make purchases.
Why Get the FAQs?
- Reduce the workload of your customer service team. If you do it correctly, your FAQ page will be your online consumers’ first point of connection — before they can contact you actively.
- Reduce your customers’ purchasing journeys. If your site visitors can find all of the answers without getting your team, they will buy right away.
- Create trust signals. Covering your terms and conditions, delivery processes and being straightforward with your site visitors will increase their trust in your brand. If your site visitors trust your brand, Google will as well.
- Make your sales funnel more impactful by including your company’s competitive advantages: What separates you from your competitors?
- Improve the internal linking on your website.
- Capture more opportunities for search visibility.
Best Practices to Create Well-Optimized FAQs
Nonetheless, FAQ pages are a valuable resource for marketers and online businesses too. In addition to responding to questions and helping prospective consumers move past their concerns (as the name implies), FAQ pages can provide you with a boost if done correctly. They can promote your business in search engine results if set up correctly, and if you’re going to use one anyway, it’s best to improve it with better FAQ page practices.
To get you started, here are several FAQs best practices:
1. Improve the clarity and structure of your H-tags.
Even though header tags are not the primary driver of good SEO rankings, they make content easier to understand and provide relevance for the content. H-tags are among over 200 ranking factors used by Google (although their effect is much smaller). Improving your FAQ page headers for clear communication and layout will enhance the user experience and allow them to conveniently check the page for the information they require. They also provide you with a slight advantage on the FAQ SEO page.
Header tags add structure and context to your page. For example, your H1 headers convey your concept, your H2 titles summarize the key topics you will cover, and your subsequent titles act as sub-headings that divide up the sub-topics on your page. For the SEO of your FAQ page, this could mean using larger headers to split up sections of your page based on topic, then using the relatively small headers to answer particular queries. A fashion brand, for example, might arrange elements such as the product name as larger headers and more specific topics such as the description, key points, or user reviews as sub-headers. Here is an example of Nykaa:
By optimizing your FAQ page’s header tags for SEO, you can improve your chances of appearing in featured snippets. Featured snippets are short text choices that appear at the top of Google’s SERP in response to a user’s request. Definitions, lists, steps, and answers to specific questions are frequently included. You can optimize your page for snippets by having a related search term or phrase in your title tag, followed by the relevant information or listicles. Optimizing for snippets is an excellent way to use your headers to improve your SEO rankings.
2. With Q&As, you can get more successful results.
In addition to assisting visitors, the FAQ SEO page can assist you in obtaining featured snippets as well as rich results. When vital information is outlined in a manner that helps Google understand the webpage as precisely as possible, featured snippets – also known as “spot 0” – are created. They can also involve carousels, photos, and other non-text elements when appropriate. You can begin enhancing these fancy results by picking up your most frequently asked and meaningful FAQs. Even though there is no reliable method for obtaining high search engine rankings, some ways may be helpful too.
There are also numerous opportunities to include search terms in your common search query questions or answers. Long-tail keywords are ideal for your Q&As because they allow you to answer queries that start with a voice search. Writing questions entirely and then answering them correctly is a good practice because it increases your chances of ranking in position 0.
Not only do Q&As help people find answers and enhance your rankings, but they also help attract more customers and assist with customer service queries. If you run a small eCommerce business without customer service representatives, having a detailed FAQ SEO page will save you a tremendous amount of time replying to the same queries about refunds, deals, and other questions about your brand.
3. Configure structured data for FAQ pages.
Structured data is beneficial for achieving rich results when integrating an FAQ SEO page because it assists Google in better understanding the content on your page. This data is coded into your page’s HTML and is only read by Google, so it has no effect on what users see on the page. While not all structured data yields rich results, it does increase your chances.
Structured data can also aid in the visibility of your content in Google Assistant results. Incorporating structured data can be very simple and convenient based on your CMS. CMS such as WordPress provides plugins to add the markup, but there are numerous other online resources to assist you in creating your schema markup. Use SuiteJar (an all-in-one SEO tool) to check if your website already has a schema markup or not.
Google has stated that they prefer JSON-LD data sets, but they also support three other formats. JSON-LD, which stands for JavaScript Object Notation – Linked Data, is described in JavaScript layout and divides the data into sections so that Google can easily read it.
Keep in mind that even if you use structured data markup, Google may not return rich results for your page. They may select not to show them for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is that they customize search results to provide a great search experience for users. Therefore, if your structured data does not accurately represent the most important content or is factually inaccurate, it will not be displayed as a rich result. More details on incorporating rich results can be found in Google’s Structured Data Guidelines.
Finally, unlike optimizing for featured snippets, structured data markup does not boost your SERP rankings. Google announced that there is no benefit to using the markup, but it may increase your CTR, allowing you to get more site traffic. On the other hand, Google motivates structured data here for a great user experience and even provides webmasters with instructions on how to incorporate it, particularly for FAQ page SEO.
4. Making use of accordion content
Contrary to popular belief, Google indexes and ranks content positioned in accordions and sidebars. Accordion menus are placed on either side lists that can be hidden or revealed by clicking on them.
Consider implementing your more complicated content into accordions or tabs to give users control over how much content they see at one time when optimizing your FAQ SEO page.
Accordions can help long, text-heavy FAQ SEO pages appear smaller by making their page appear smaller. You can further organize your content within the accordions by using sub-headings or tabs to make it easier to search through necessary information. The benefits of using accordions are:
- Less scrolling.
- Making the pages appear less intimidating.
- Acting as an alternative to on-page links.
Accordions are most beneficial on pages where consumers do not need to see all of the content to find the answer to their questions. This is ideal for FAQ pages because it allows users to find quick answers as long as the content is appropriately formatted and easy to navigate. In addition, using accurate and proper headers will enable them to quickly skip from section to section to find what they are looking for.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do Frequently Asked Questions Pages Work?
Yes, having Frequently Asked Questions pages on your website is effective. However, you must have a strategy in place to best method the process. Simply adding content with a slew of questions and answers isn’t going to get you long-term organic traffic success.
Is it still a good idea to have a FAQ section?
Of course, but only if you take this seriously.
Can I use some of the answers on another webpage?
It’s not a “problematic” issue of duplicate content (meaning Google won’t penalize you for it). Still, the best way to prevent the same content is to write the new (original) answers for every page.
FAQ content has the potential to drive a large amount of highly targeted traffic to your website. In addition, it boosts your SEO rankings as Google values the fact that your website is focused on providing people with all of the information they need to make an informed decision about your product.
How many frequently asked questions are too many?
Less than five questions may indicate that you haven’t done your homework or didn’t need a FAQ in the first place. Fielding dozens of questions is also undesirable, but if they are all necessary, consider separating your FAQ into different pages.
What should the length of a FAQ page?
A general rule of thumb is to write brief responses to each question — two to three sentences would suffice. If you go on for too long, the page will become too long and complicated.