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Improving SEO rankings with an FAQs page
When working within an SEO agency, it’s important to cover all grounds, and deliver long-term, efficient results. One way of effectively doing this, is by creating an FAQ page. So, what is an FAQ page, and why is it important?
An FAQ page, is short for Frequently Asked Questions. These are primarily used as a space on an ecommerce store where important information about a business is shared. These are used to clarify questions and uncertainties users may have.
FAQ pages, have in fact been around since the early ages of the internet. Picked up by site owners from mailing lists, FAQ pages were used to dedicate entire sections of their site, with the intention of helping users navigate across the site and find solutions.
The internet as a collective whole, has continued to evolve. With this, businesses began to introduce more content and new features into their sites. As a result, FAQ pages have at times, been neglected and left aside – built with basic functionality and not necessarily user friendly.
In recent years as search engines have developed and began to implement new features such as voice search and featured snippets. Since this has taken place, FAQ pages have resurfaced, and have started to become one of the most integral part of a website.
Why is an FAQ page relevant for SEO?
From an SEO perspective, the most valuable reason to deploy an FAQ page is due to it directly improving your site’s organic rankings. This is due to Google valuing good content. The prime basis of an FAQ page is to help a user find relevant information quickly and easily. This makes an FAQ page highly influential to your SEO rankings. When your FAQ page is properly set up, it can also drive traffic into specific pages within your website that otherwise would be harder to find.
From a business perspective, an FAQ page is an extremely powerful tool as it helps customers find their way through your site and get answers quickly. This is all achieved without the user having to reach out so frequently, subsequently saving you costs on customer service.
What are the steps to creating an FAQ page?
1. Learn about your audience
Queries should reflect your users needs, so before you start looking for questions you must be aware of what might be relevant to your business. Sometimes, the most common queries won’t serve you well. This is because they drive great amounts of traffic, but are not specific to your business, meaning that they won’t answer any relevant questions.
A good way of knowing what your audience is looking for is going through your costumer support emails or asking your staff what the most frequent interactions with customers are. You should be aware as to how your website works from a user perspective, and learn what the most technical difficulties may be i.e. returning a product / changing an order.
2. Search for relevant queries
Searching for queries that may coincide with your business is a given when creating an FAQ page! You can do this using the following methods.
Google it: Whilst there are different approaches to searching for relevant queries, what you can do is start off by searching a specific term, or keyword related to your business, into Google’s search bar. When scrolling across the first results page, you will find a primary picture as to what users are frequently searching for. Featured snippets and ‘people also ask’ features by Google are extremely useful to use, since they provide you with the most popular and best ranked queries. This is where you will want to place your business’ site.
Explore different tools: There are several useful tools you can also use to develop your FAQ page, such as Quora, Reddit or Google Trends. My personal favourite being SEMrush, since it provides a comprehensive list of the most popular queries by keyword. This is then compared against relevant metrics such as search volume, trend, keyword competitive density and SERPs features. Generally, this will allow your business to not only know what the queries are, but also which ones might be more valuable and achievable for rankings.
Spy on your competitors: Similarly to any other optimisations carried out on your site, it is important that you’re aware of your competitors FAQ page. Understanding how they have implemented it on their site, is crucial when developing your FAQ page. This is even more effective when researching into your competitors that are ranking at the top, as this is a good indicator as to what they’re doing right.
3. Write the answer
Once you have compiled your list of queries related to your business, the next step is to create the answers. For this to work efficiently, be sure to be clear, straightforward and helpful. It is always best, if the person writing the answers is perfectly aware of the subject and what the best solution may be.
As an SEO specialist working within an B2B SEO agency, I tend to allow this part to be provided by the client. Later optimised by myself in regards to SEO.
Be sure to choose different ways of providing the answer such as interactive menus, images or videos. Finally, do consider what the next step might be that follows on from the answer, providing the user with options such as links to specific pages or CTA’s (call to actions).
4. Place the FAQ page on your site
The final step to building your FAQ page, is to place it within your website. Choose from placing this within the top menu, sidebar or footer, and be sure to make it easily accessible. You can also consider in addition to your dedicated page, to spread the queries across various pages on your site. This can prove t be useful for specific subjects or functionalities of particular pages.
Polaris is an award-winning B2B SEO agency in London specialising B2B, PPC, e-commerce and the healthcare industry.
