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Frequently Asked Questions have been a mainstay of the internet since its earliest days.
They were originally used by NASA to onboard new users without cluttering message boards with the same tired topics. FAQs have come a long way, and while they may not always be used for something as interesting as space travel, they can still launch your pages into the stratosphere.
The first FAQs were developed because NASA’s new hires didn’t read the assigned documentation and inevitably had questions. For anyone in IT or customer assistance, this is a great example of the old expression; “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”
Nowadays, FAQs are used for more than providing quick answers, they’re a cornerstone of successful SEO content strategies.
But how do you go about writing and answering these questions in a way that ranks highly?
How do you even know what your users want to know?
This article will examine the best practices and techniques for creating, housing, and optimizing FAQs on website pages, with the goal of hitting Google’s front page or getting more real estate on it.
Before worrying about which questions are burning a hole in customers' minds, it’s worth taking the time to reflect on internal questions and issues.
This involves communicating with different departments and stakeholders, especially sales people, to get a complete picture of the most pressing issues. There may be considerable overlap, or there may be entirely different problems from one source to another.
Website FAQs typically fall into one of two broad categories:
Understanding the difference between these two is crucial, as they each provide vastly different benefits. Depending on your goals, you may want to focus on one over the other.
If your goal is increased traffic through SEO, one is the obvious winner.
Product-focused FAQs are where most people start, but that’s not always the right move.
If you want to bring in net new visitors and boost site traffic, SEO-focused FAQs are the way to go.
Christie Digital has FAQs listed in multiple categories, including specific, product-focused queries
Product FAQs aren’t too hard to understand. They aim to directly answer a user query or solve an issue, specifically pertaining to the products or services being offered.
Allowing your users access to trained professionals via a Contact Us or Help section on the website is a great way to directly interface with users and find out their pain points, but you don’t need to wait for them to offer that info up on a silver platter.
Online forums can be a great way to learn about user issues, as contributors are there to highlight and solve specific problems, and often speak very candidly about their experiences and difficulties. This provides a firsthand sample of how users talk about the product or service, and the issues they have with it.
Tailscale, a wireguard-built VPN, has an active Reddit community that frequently posts questions and issues with the product
For inexperienced marketers, these may seem like the ideal type of questions to put on-page. After all, they provide authority and ease-of-use for the consumer to solve their own problems.
This is a mistake.
While it is wise to have some product-focused FAQs, these questions are ultimately too narrow in scope to be effective for SEO ranking efforts.
Using the product name will make your FAQs easy to find for existing users, but it won’t bring in any new eyes.
Christie Digital maximizes their efforts by also including “general” FAQs, that are written with SEO in mind, using simple language and relevant keywords in their cinema and projector technology FAQs section.
The majority of FAQ efforts should be devoted to crafting SEO-focused questions. These will enhance page rankings far more effectively, as they aren’t bogged down with specific, branded keywords.
Instead, SEO-focused questions can take a much broader approach to answering the query, providing the opportunity to hijack other searches and bring in new customers to discover the product.
This is mainly accomplished by using plain, simple language, and inserting relevant keywords within the question.
Think of it like this; you can craft a question like “Connect my smartphone to Christie Digital projector #1234”. This way, any user looking to connect their Christie Digital Projector #1234 can easily find and resolve their issue.
But you can do better.
Connecting smartphones to projectors is a common function, so you can assume that tons of users are searching for some variation of how to do that.
By phrasing your question in a way like: “connect my smartphone to a digital projector", you can capture a much wider array of searches, bringing in potential conversions, diverting competitor traffic to your page.
This will also help to establish your business as an authority on a field of information, rather than just being an expert on your own product.
Once you’ve written your questions and answers, you need to find somewhere to house these on your website.
Some businesses opt to consolidate all of their FAQs on a single master page, but this will only hamstring SEO efforts. A stand-alone FAQ page is going to cover a lot of topics, so this is not going to be successful at ranking for anything in Google.
The magic of SEO-focused FAQs is to place them on the pages you are trying to rank for specific keywords, therefore it makes sense to craft specific FAQs for all of your target SEO pages.
We recommend placing 3 to 4 topically relevant and unique FAQs on each targeted page.
Deposco, a cloud-based order fulfillment and WMS systems provider, lists their FAQs just below their article content, so that readers naturally scroll down to it.
This way, the questions can be structured with high-difficulty and competitive keywords. In fact, FAQs are one of the best ways to work complicated keywords into content, as the format is much more flexible than normal copy writing.
Content Camel’s own top sales enablement tools page has 6 SEO-focused FAQs at the bottom of the page which add quite a bit of keyword rich content to the page.
Check out Google’s guidelines on FAQ pages to learn more.
After you’ve discovered the internal FAQs, you can start researching externally to find out what your potential customers most want to learn or do.
The “people also ask” section of google search results provides excellent insight into related searches. Still, understanding the general industry FAQs for a business will broaden perspective and reveal more than narrow, specific-business-focused research will yield.
When we talk about SEO FAQs, there’s a few differences both in intended purpose, and execution.
On-page SEO optimizations are all about content: keyword insertion, title tags, meta tags, headlines, and image optimization all fall under this category. Frequently Asked Questions are primarily handled through this lens, as the copy needs to be high value, and relevant to the rest of the piece.
On-Page SEO isn’t the only way that FAQs can boost page rankings. An often overlooked technique is to utilize FAQ Schema Markups in the page’s code. This will tell search engine crawlers that this content consists of specifically questions and answers when crawling your pages.
An example of a properly formatted FAQ schema
This technical SEO practice allows search engines to see and analyze the questions and answers in an FAQ section, determine their accuracy, authority, and relevance, and boost the rating accordingly.
When implementing your FAQ Schema, you should be mindful that readers could wind up getting the answers to their questions within the search results rather than navigating to your webpage, thus hampering your traffic generation goals.
Crafting answers that draw readers in and encourage further website exploration is the best way to handle this issue.
Netchex places its CTA right beneath the FAQs on its payroll software page, so users can easily contact sales with any questions not answered.
It’s a fine line to walk between informative and engaging, but the benefits of great SEO-focused FAQs will be worth the effort. A good way to do this is include a call to action or link at the end of your FAQ, which may be included on the search page.
You can measure the value of your FAQ schema with programs like Google’s Schema Markup Testing Tool.
Sysdig has a featured snippet on the front page thanks to high quality, relevant, and SEO-focused writing
If your FAQs are good enough, you could even have them showcased on Page 1 of Google!
Tailscale managed to get an extended listing on Google’s front page thanks to using general, SEO-focused FAQs rather than focusing on the product.
This can happen when your content is used as a Featured Snippet, an extended listing, or in the “People Also Ask” section on Google’s front page.
It’s possible to get multiple ranking benefits for a single page. Tailscale double-dips with Split DNS, scoring a listing in the “people also ask” section.
Check out the Schema Markup Generator by TechnicalSEO to try it firsthand.
Whether product-focused or SEO-focused, FAQs should all adhere to internal standards and best practices for technical factors.
This includes the length of the FAQ itself, the number of questions in each section, the linking format, keyword insertion and more.
For example, Google specifically looks at the first two listed FAQs to determine if they are worth displaying in their SERPs, so it’s advised to put the best FAQs at the top.
Schema Markup and FAQ housing is covered above, so let’s look at the nitty gritty of FAQ writing to discover the tricks of the trade.
Content length in FAQs is fairly straightforward. You need to communicate as briskly as possible all the necessary information that you need to list, both to answer the user’s query, and to promote the page to search engines.
A few short sentences should be all that’s required for each FAQ; anything longer may require a dedicated article or short document to find a solution.
It won’t help to pack in dozens of FAQs onto your page, even if they all have good keywords and links.
FAQ sections should never dominate a page, instead serving as a cherry on top (or, if you put it in the footer, a cherry on the bottom).
3-4 relevant SEO-focused questions are recommended to achieve the most success. This number will allow writers to address the top concerns relevant to a topic, while still leaving room to entice the reader to check out other, complimentary articles.
FAQs present a unique and valuable opportunity to use very specific and long-tail keywords that would otherwise be too awkward or difficult to fit into your main copy.
Part of what makes keyword insertion so effective is weaving them in naturally with the text. With FAQs, the more blunt nature of the writing allows for less elegant phrasing, allowing the writer to craft questions in the same way that users do when searching Google for their answers.
This is especially helpful for businesses that deal with very technical, high-expertise issues, as the keywords associated with those topics can be difficult to include organically in the main body of a piece.
Now that you understand the value of SEO FAQs, you can adopt them into your content workflow.
To sum up, the benefits to your content provided by SEO-focused FAQs include:
With these boons in mind, and armed with the best practices above, you’re now equipped to start researching, crafting, and ranking with SEO-focused FAQs.
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Content Camel is a sales enablement tool used for sales content management. High-growth sales teams use our system to quickly find and share the right content for each specific sales situation and measure content use and effectiveness.