Higher Search Rankings May Be a Matter of Asking the Right Questions

Help potential customers get the information they need by matching your copy to the questions they’re asking.

FAQ pages can be a powerful tool for modern SEO — if they are optimized for today’s audience.

Search results page after typing in the query “how to write an FAQ page.” Results include rich snippet results, including a list, screenshots, and a “people also search for” section.

We’ve all been there.

We’re ready to invest in a service or product, but we need to know some specifics first. So we check out the websites of the two or three companies we’re considering.

One website has an FAQ page that answers general questions about the company, but it doesn’t have the specifics we’re looking for.

One website doesn’t have an FAQ page at all.

But just like Goldilocks, we find the third company to be just right. It has an FAQ page specifically focused on the service we’re looking for, and the company seems to have read our minds about our questions and concerns.

Guess who gets our business?

The most powerful FAQ pages answer the questions customers are already searching for, creating higher-quality leads and increasing sales.

I learned the lesson of how powerful an FAQ page could be years ago at the beginning of running my own agency. One of the first websites we ever worked on was with our client, Mrs. Grout, and part of that project was to create an FAQ page.

Screenshot of Mrs. Grout’s FAQ page, showing a clean kitchen in the background. A transparent blue square on the right with white text reads: “Mrs. Grout’s FAQs: Discover Answers to Common Grout Cleaning Questions and More.”

This page accounts for about 25 percent of Mrs. Grout’s monthly leads — four years after the page’s initial creation.

We’ve spent a little time optimizing the page over the years, but for the most part, the content remains the same.

Successful FAQ pages center on just two criteria:

1. Each FAQ page should be focused on only one product or service. Do you provide multiple services? Create multiple FAQ pages. This reduces confusion and helps your audience find exactly what they’re looking for.
2. The questions included on the page should reflect the questions people are actually asking. Your sales team and customer service people are asked these questions daily. And these questions show up most commonly in search when people are looking for what you have to offer.

Leveraging your team experience will create the most successful FAQ page for your company.

To create the Mrs. Grout FAQ page, we asked the company’s sales teams and office team to spend a few weeks documenting the most common questions they were asked.

Since this client provides just one service, we consolidated those questions into one easy-to-read FAQ page.

Screenshot of the question menu of Mrs. Grout’s FAQ page, with the question “Can my grout be repaired?” highlighted in purple.

Four years later, this simple page is their website’s third highest performing page and has brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars for their business.

While the data Mrs. Grout’s team collected told us exactly which topics to cover, we didn’t stop there. We also used the language of Mrs. Grout’s customers to ensure we were asking the questions the same way their audience was asking them.

Why?

Because people search in questions.

And when you match the language of your copy to the language of your audience, magic happens.

One question from Mrs. Grout’s FAQ page, written in a way a customer would ask it: “How do I remove mold and mildew from my shower and bathtub?”

FAQ pages are the perfect place to incorporate medium-tail, action-based keywords and boost your brand’s SEO.

Question-oriented phrases help make it easy for bots to know when your content is relevant to a user’s question.

Using the right keywords helps ensure your content reaches your audience and draws them into everything your brand has to offer. When it seems like everyone is using certain keywords in your industry and creating too much noise, medium-tail keywords help narrow the competition.

But don’t stop there.

In 2022, it’s not enough to simply create an FAQ page with words and images. To make it more likely that you’ll show up in the questions section of a search, you mark up your FAQs with structured data.

This is an often missed part of modern content development. It’s critical to know whether or not your website has this feature built-in, has a plugin for it, or if that work will need to be done manually.

You know those “people also ask” sections on a Google search results page?

Have you noticed this section is written in question format?

That’s the power of FAQ markup on your page.

Screenshot of the “people also ask” section of a search results page. It shows other questions people ask related to the query “what is the people also ask section?”

A highly contextual, informational relevant, and technically sound FAQ page provides some of the highest value for e-commerce, service, and community-based small business websites.

A final advantage to FAQ pages that we don’t want to overlook is that this is one of those areas where doing the right thing and doing what’s right for your business overlap.

When we focus on meeting our audience’s needs, we are reminded that business is personal. That’s how we Do Better Digital™.

This simple addition to your copy strategy can give you a lasting return on your investment — financially and relationally.

Reportedly, people are conducting about 8.5 billion daily searches on Google alone.

Your audience is looking for information. With a well-thought-out, customer-centered FAQ page, your brand can be the one to provide it.

How is your brand using FAQ pages?

If your FAQ pages aren’t performing well, consider researching the types of questions your audience is actually asking.

And if you don’t have an FAQ page, maybe now is the time to add one to your content strategy.

To learn more about the advantages of a copy-first marketing strategy, check out my previous article.

Check out my Complete Guide to a Copy-First Marketing Strategy here.