The dot com revolution has changed how businesses are run. The fault lines are drawn and now a solid virtual presence is an arsenal that can get you ahead of your competition. From landing pages to social media channels, everything has become an arena. Despite all the platforms, major websites still hold a principal position in the grand scheme.
A website is a dynamic structure that is built and optimized to help a campaign gain momentum in the online world and reach its potential. On a given website, you will find content in a variety of formats, such as written, images, advertisements, etc.
There are dedicated pages on a website that helps users navigate through it to get the information they are looking for in the first place. To aid the new users or the old ones looking their way out of a problem, FAQ pages are designed.
What is a FAQ page?
It is an important page for businesses and business websites. FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions. In a nutshell, it is a page with a list of common questions related to issues and general informational content for the users.
When it comes to website building and optimization, there is a template that professionals use. One aspect of an effective website is to have dedicated pages to dispense specific information about the business. These include;
- Contact Us
- About Us
- Privacy Policy
Another analogy for a FAQ page is an effective customer support page, the ultimate place where they can find relevant information without dealing with a Chabot or a representative of the business.
Why should you have a FAQ page on your website?
It is all about streamlining customer support.
Think of it this way. If there is no page on the website where users can go through common issues, problems, and solutions, it would be a disaster for the support staff. It is because they would have to answer the same questions over and over again in a day.
Having a dedicated FAQ page can solve problems for a business before they are even realized.
What is the scope of a FAQ page?
Apart from saving a lot of trouble for your support staff, you can optimize your FAQ page to promote your brand or products.
There is a simple reason why popular and established brands pay much heed to their FAQ pages and update them continuously. This helps them in putting out new information without overhauling major parts of a website. All it takes is asking a question and then answering it.
There are other ways you can use the FAQ page to your advantage, including SEO.
Now we will move to how to build an optimized and useful page for your website.
1. Leverage the power of SEO strategy
The first and foremost thing for an effective SEO strategy is identifying the latest search trends, and there is no exception for the FAQ page because people ask questions to a search engine.
The emphasis here is on the keywords, the exact and generic phrases that people are using in a given time to find what they are looking for. This is the basic step in optimizing an FAQ page.
2. Do a proper semantic analysis
You should start with a semantic analysis to understand the relation between the words and the query behind them. The best thing about this research is that you can do it using SEO tools that can help you in breaking down the whole pile of information into smaller bits to study.
Proper keyword analysis will help you to find out audience search intents. This is a very powerful way to understand your audience’s motive & target. What they are looking for? And by doing this you can target the right audience in your webpage contents. Thus it will increase your chances of conversion.
However, to make it work you need to use eye-catchy headlines in your content. Only 20% of readers will read your content if your headlines can manage to attract their attention. Therefore, a proper semantic analysis for keywords as well as attractive headlines can increase your success rate.
3. Use Google suggestion to get the idea
Then, some tools can tell you what is hot these days. The simple way to go around this is by using Google’s as-you-type suggestions. Even for this, there are many tools and software that can retrieve rich data from Google and then allow you to optimize your content.
4. Organize all the common questions in groups
After getting all this data, you know you cannot use all of this by asking hypothetical questions to cover them.
This is where you need to organize all the questions you need to answer and then rationalize why you want them to do so.
Following identifying points can help you in the filtering process;
- Make bundles and groups and then subgroups.
- Collect related questions into one group.
- Group questions in one place if the search intent is the same.
In addition to your discretion, you can use some site-building plugins to get your way around organizing your questions.
5. Proper use of schema on the FAQ page for better indexing
In the search engine, the crawlers rely heavily on a schema or structured markup to retrieve information against certain snippets. This helps them enrich the excerpts by giving the users what they want without even visiting the relevant page.
If you are looking to build rich snippets on the FAQ page, there is a dedicated FAQ Page Schema. You can create it easily by going through instructions in your plugins.
A cool feature about these plugins is that they can even allow you to set your FAQs at H1 or H2. This is what search engines use to find the right answer to the questions.
6. Don’t forget to use internal links in the answers
This is one of the overlooked steps by SEO specialists and publishers when they optimize content for the web. When Google shows the answers in the snippet, often they seem conclusive and the users will not feel the need to go one and click the link.
By adding internal links to the answers, they will appear in the organic traffic and you can convince the users to explore more. Otherwise, as mentioned in the previous section, they will skimp on clicking the webpage link and move on to the next search.
7. Create a table of contents
If you have put reasonable thought into the second step of this guide, the organization of your questions, you will find it a lot easier to do this step.
By creating a clickable, easy-to-navigate table of content, you are facilitating your users in getting to the right answers in the least possible time. By giving the “jump to” tabs to the readers, they are more than welcome to go through the content.
To create such a table of content, you need to create an anchor link for each question on your FAQ page. Then, you have to hyperlink each question to its corresponding anchor link to get the finished product.
8. Use the search bar to make it flexible for the audience
There are chances that users are in the mood to scroll down to the answers they are looking for. At this time, it does not hurt, but benefits, to have a search bar up top on the FAQ page. By typing in certain keywords, the users will be directed to the relevant FAQ without much hassle.
9. Proper visualization is the key
A picture is worth more than a thousand words. It is cliché but you can use it in your favor and consequently in that of your clients. Adding pictures and screenshots to the answers will allow them to navigate the problem in a real-world setting.
By optimizing this media, you can still get an SEO edge which will bring organic traffic to your website.
A FAQ page is a great way to address the concerns and questions of the majority of users before they could ask them. By following this guide, you will be able to create and optimize the FAQ page that can help you in the promotion of your brand and solidify your position among your competitors.
Conclusion
When your website grows with thousands of contents & millions of monthly visitors you will need a FAQ page one way or another. Maybe not today but because it is a small site or you have a handful of visitors but what about after 3-6 years later.
If you plan for a long-term business website, then it is inevitable. Especially if your business is service-related like consultancy, agency, etc. If you can build & optimize it in a proper way, it will not only save lots of time for your employees but also will help you to reduce unnecessary expenditure as well as will bring thousands of extra organic traffic to your site.