Improve Your Website with FAQs: a Digital Strategy Guide
FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions.
FAQ pages have been a popular feature of websites for many years now.
The original concept of the FAQ page was to save company staff and website managers time by pre-empting questions they get asked repeatedly.
If you are running a website of any nature, posting responses to the most commonly asked questions on a publicly visible page within your site allows visitors who want to make a general enquiry to find the answer for themselves without taking up your valuable time.
When visitors can read the answers to their questions on your site, they don’t need to call you, or email you.
Benefits of FAQ pages
However, saving time and effort on the repeated answering of general questions is only one benefit of putting up an FAQ page on your site. Here are three others:
- The answers you give to questions can actively inform visitors to your site about your products and services or related matters of interest. Even if they had not thought of asking you the questions, they can learn from the answers, and this can increase their interest in what you have to offer as well as increasing the likelihood that enquiries they make will be relevant ones.
- A well-written FAQ page will include questions that match the phrases for which people search on search engines closely enough to make it visible in the results for those searches. In other words, you can actually increase the visibility of your website to people making general enquiries on search engines by replicating those enquiries on a page of your site.
- The content of the answers you post can also be tailored to include relevant keywords and phrases for which people with an interest in what you offer are searching, further boosting your potential visibility through search engine searches, especially if this is supported by carefully chosen title tags and descriptions for each overall FAQ page.
Multiple FAQ pages
Yes, you read that right: you don’t have to stop at one FAQ page. But why should you consider more than one? Here are two good reasons!
- You can direct your visitors more efficiently to answers to the topics that directly concern them if, instead of one long one, you have multiple shorter but topically focused FAQ pages within your site.
- Having multiple FAQ pages can also be an advantage for SEO, allowing you to optimise every FAQ page to its particular topic. The use of appropriate title tags that include both key-phrases representing that topic and terms such as FAQs or Frequently Asked Questions is key to achieving this, and the meta description of each FAQ page should also be specifically focused on its topic.
Bristol solicitors Battrick Clark of Whiteladies Road have a website with separate FAQ pages for four different areas of law in which they specialise.
Tips for FAQ pages
Some more advice we would give regarding good practice for FAQ pages includes:
1. Make it easy for customers to find what they need
- You should make sure that each FAQ page is easy to navigate so visitors can easily find what they are looking for.
- Be selective: consider which questions are truly going to be most helpful for your clients to have answered for them.
- Consider starting your page with a simple list of the questions answered on it, and embedding jump links in each item of that list, thereby allowing visitors to jump immediately to the questions further down the page that are most relevant to their concerns without the need for scrolling.
2. Keep your answers easy to read
- Avoid technical language and jargon in your answers, though of course it is fine to use clear English to answer a question about what a piece of technical language or jargon means.
- Keep your answers concise and to the point, avoiding unnecessary details. You can use other pages of your site for fuller discussions of particular topics and link to those pages from short answers on your FAQ pages.
3. Make sure that all the information on your FAQ page is accurate and up-to-date.
- If you are not sure of anything, research it from multiple trustworthy sources.
4. Give users the option to make contact with you if they have an enquiry that is not answered on your website.
- This is very important to customer relations, since the last thing you want is to discourage a genuine established or potential customer from doing business with you by making it difficult for them to contact you.
- Reading an FAQ page can often be a prelude to making a purchase or sales enquiry. Consider your FAQ pages as an integral part of your sales funnel. You don’t want users to drop off your FAQ page, satisfied with your answers as a final destination. You should encourage them to take further action if they are potentially interested in buying from you.
From the points we have discussed above, we can see it is definitely worth considering creating one, if not more FAQ pages for your website. If, after reading this, you still can’t decide on what the best option for a potential FAQ page would be, why not get in touch? One of the services we offer is Digital Marketing and Strategy, so we can help determine if a FAQ section would be in line with your goals.
