There are a few reasons why you need to consider adding an FAQ section to your website. But why is it so important to add an FAQ section? Simple. It’s time-saving, useful for your customers and clients, and it’s great for SEO. Also, thanks to one of Google’s most recent search engine updates, businesses can take even more steps to make their website stand out in search engine results.
In this article, I’m going to cover why FAQs are important, how you can find good FAQ ideas for your business or niche, and what you can do to make your website stand out in search engine results.
So, why are FAQs so important for my website?
Here’s a TL;DR:
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- They’re time-saving for customers.
- Reduce your customer support team’s workload.
- Great for search engine optimization (SEO).
Firstly, FAQs are time-saving. But why? It’s time-saving as it reduces the need for your customers or client base to go out of their way to contact you or your support team to ask simple-to-solve questions.
Second, it also reduces your support team’s workload. In turn, this allows your support representatives to focus on more important and complex customer issues that can’t be easily solved in one FAQ post.
However, one of the most important reasons for adding FAQs to your website is for SEO purposes. But how do FAQs help with SEO? Aside from one big reason (that I’ll explain below), well-written and valuable FAQs will help to boost your website’s ranking and can even place your website in the highest spot on Google — the “Featured snippet”.
Why is Google’s recent update good for FAQs?
Google’s latest update now allows for websites to add their own FAQ drop dropdown menus underneath the SERP title — similar to the Google-generated FAQs menu. Adding the FAQ menu underneath your SERP titles can really make your website stand out from the already overcrowded search engine results page. Try adding up to 4 valuable FAQs to your dropdown menu that relates to the page that you’re adding FAQs to. But what should your FAQs look like?
How do I find FAQ ideas for my website?
It’s true. Finding good ideas for your FAQs can be tough. However, there are a few ways you can find great FAQ ideas.
But I’m going to keep it simple for you. Just go to AnswerThePublic.com, type in the main keyword for your page, and then hit search. AnswerThePublic will return a huge list of frequently searched keyphrases and FAQs from which you can pick out the best ones for your site and turn them into titles for each of your FAQs.
When using AnswerThePublic, be sure to edit the suggested key terms and not just copy and paste them. Try and edit the suggestions to make them unique to your site.
But now you have your titles, what about the actual content of the FAQ?
How do I write good FAQs?
Writing good FAQs is pretty easy if you follow these steps:
- Always give the reader the information they’re looking for in the first sentence — not further down in the FAQ.
- Make the FAQ as detailed and valuable as possible. Always seek to give readers extra information relating to their questions.
- Always include a contextual hyperlink to your website. So readers can come straight to your website to find more information.
Be sure to be very simple and straight-to-the-point with your language and cut out as many fluffy unnecessary sentences as possible.
Staying Ahead of the Competition on Google
You don’t have to get lost in the number of competitors in Google’s search engine results.
Keeping your web pages updated is important, but offering valuable FAQs not only boost your SEO ranking, but they also help to draw more customers to your business and save your customer support staff time and effort answering basic questions.
To learn more about how you can improve your website and overall marketing strategy, read through some of the latest blog posts on the Intentionally Inspirational blog.
Written by Lewis James