FAQs Are Crucial to Your Business. Learn Why!

Charles Protues Steinmetz, German-born American mathematician and engineer once stated:

“There are no foolish questions and no man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions.”

Read Time: 6 minutes 

Questions are so important; they have been quoted throughout history!

It’s no different today, and no different for websites.

We want to share with you 3 simple reasons why you should be adding “Frequently Asked Questions” or “FAQ” sections and pages to your website.

The crazy thing is, FAQ sections are super easy to add AND think of content for, and every single business out there can benefit from it. Yup. That’s right. Even yours.

1)   FAQs enhance the User Experience (UX)

Interesting factoid about FAQ pages. Obviously, we put – a lot – of websites live. Many of these have an FAQ page. When we come to review a website a few weeks after its launch, guess where in rankings we see the FAQ page? Typically, within the top 10.

People use them.

And that’s an incredibly important thing to realise.

You see, when people reach for the internet – when they reach your website – they’re looking to answer a question. Now, that question could be as simple as “what’s your phone number?” (side note: this is why clearly signed contact information is so important).

On the other hand, that question could be about the product or service you offer.

Now, let’s take a moment to consider the average website user – in fact, think about your very own experience online.

When you land on a website looking for a piece of information, are you more likely to hunt around various pages in a desperate search for what you’re looking for? Or would you rather click on FAQs?

Worst case scenario, you will go somewhere else to get the information you need!

People are typically time-starved. Having FAQs, making them well sign-posted and easy to use helps website users know where to go to answer their questions. Quickly.

It’s key for websites to follow UX principles. Why? Because then your website is designed to be easy, simple, intuitive for your users to use.

FAQs also allow us to eliminate wordy text blocks which people never read (trust us on this one). That content can instead be restructured into FAQ sections or pages which we know people do read.

This results in the information on a page being simplified. This means cleaner designs, increased readability and an improved experience for the user.

2)   FAQs save you money on customer service (and even improve sales!)

Time is money. And customer service takes time.

But what if I told you that there was a magical way to reduce the number of questions your customers ask?

Now, with this being an article about the virtues of FAQs, it doesn’t take an Einstein to know what this magical method is.

But the logic is sound.

Answering customer questions can take up a lot of time. Some companies even have entire departments to service them.

Whilst FAQs won’t eliminate you having to deliver customer service, they will have an impact on the amount you will have to invest in it.

By taking the questions that you are most – well, frequently – asked. Creating FAQ pages or sections answering them. You will create somewhere that a majority of your customers will go when they otherwise might have picked up the phone.

Giving customers a quick answer to their basic questions frees up your customer service team’s time to concentrate on the more complicated issues.

Looking to improve sales? FAQ sections can do that.

For every customer who rings or emails with a basic question, how many don’t?

How many seek out an answer, can’t find it, and just abandon your funnel?

Personal bug-bear – eCommerce sites that don’t reveal their shipping times or prices. Including that information in either an FAQ section or page can help increase sales.

In fact, providing answers to basic questions can give your business a distinct competitive advantage over competitors.

Customers are seeking out answers to their questions. If customers don’t get them, they are likely to abandon any funnel. Yet, if no competitors are providing FAQs (or providing poor quality FAQs), you are putting yourself ahead by giving them.

Now, this is incredibly simple to achieve when you’re selling a physical product.

The difficulty can come in the service or knowledge-based sectors. You might not want to provide information for fear of just giving it away.

The problem with this is that all it takes is for a competitor to begin providing the information for them to get ahead.

But why would that get them ahead?

FAQs set you up as an expert. And this is where the advantage lies for those in the service and knowledge-based sector; being portrayed as an expert.

3)   SEO ❤️s FAQs

SEO. Search Engine Optimisation. It’s a mad mystical beast that can lead a person to use Comic Sans.

One benefit of FAQs is that – when done properly – they can have a huge positive impact on your SEO rankings.

Without boring you and going into too much detail, there are two key reasons why SEO ❤️s FAQs.

Firstly – semantic & long-tail key phrases.

Semantic words and long-tail key phrases are more specific phrases. Typically, they get less search traffic but are known to have a higher conversion rate.

The great thing about FAQs is that your questions and answers will be littered with semantic words & long-tail keywords without you even thinking about it.

Littering your content with semantic words & long-tail key phrases has an annoying effect of giving you better organic search positions.

Why? Well, this brings us to…

Secondly – Relevancy.

Yup. Relevancy. We’ve talked about the importance of being relevant before. And there’s a very good reason why.

Google loves relevancy. Think of their business aim – they need to give you the most relevant information – the most relevant answers – to your questions.

With an FAQ section or page, you are effectively giving your users the most relevant information to their questions. This is why Google loves FAQs so much.

Incidentally, this is also why the ‘People also ask’ section appears so high on search results. Google understands that questions & answers are incredibly relevant to people’s searches. So, voila! Straight to the top!

And for all those Schema fans out there, you might have even noticed that FAQs have even snuck into rich results recently.

Schema is a type of structural data code that you can include into your web pages. It helps search engines understand what information it is looking at. Adding in the Schema code for FAQs to your page helps search engines identify them.

This results in FAQs having a strong impact on the SEO performance of your website. But don’t get caught out! Try not to approach FAQs as a way to improve SEO.

You should approach FAQs as a way to help your website users. To help answer your customers’ questions. To make their lives easier.

If you use them solely as a tactic to improve your SEO, you’ll end up missing the point of the FAQs. And if you miss the point, you won’t get the desired results.

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As you can see, FAQs are an incredibly powerful tool for websites. FAQs are completely universal. Every single business out there will be able to produce FAQs of some nature. And they should! Because… well, the 3 reasons mentioned above!

Need a helping hand? Head over to Answer The Public, type in the product or service you provide and you’ll be given a list of questions your customers have been asking on Google.

Voila! You now have a list of key questions being asked. Get answering and including these on your website to earn brownie points with your customers.

Want your website to win? Stuck with your FAQs? Then get in touch with our team. From building you a completely bespoke FAQ page right thorough to helping you write the content, we can help!