7 ways to write FAQs for a better website conversion

Using FAQs to drive sales

At an age where it’s a challenge to grab human attention for more than eight seconds, content creators for websites are under increasing pressure to address visitors’ questions quickly.

Marketers are addressing this problem by communicating core benefits of their product or service upfront, and leaving most of the specific details for their FAQs page. Typically, a website has a dedicated FAQ page with lots of questions and answers thrown in, with the expectation that the content there is easy to navigate and understand.

Our internal analytics team at Airim recently found that for a website offering a service like finance, education or SaaS, the FAQs page attracts over 20% of the traffic. Also, a buyer who ends up signing up for a service is 52% likely to have visited the FAQs page.

We then went to each website where we knew the conversion rate was high, and found out seven aspects that differentiated them. We’ve listed them below:

1. Answer basic questions such as “What is X” : Search engines love FAQs page. If your target audience is searching for a question regarding your industry, but not your brand, it is quite likely that Google will take them to your FAQs page rather than homepage. Answering basic questions will help you give context quickly.
   Also, It is improbable to assume that every visitor understands who you are and what you exactly do from the homepage alone. Rephrasing what you do increases the chance that the visitor understands what your company is about.
2. Write your content using the same words your customer speaks: The best way to connect with your customer is by using the same lingo as them. Successful marketers usually do that by including keywords and phrases their buyers search most in Google, which also helps boost their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) ranking.
3. Shorter the question, the better: Let’s be honest here, who wants to read a three sentence question? Long questions tend to confuse and disinterest visitors. On the flipside, a long list of short questions isn’t any better. Finding the right balance is key. When in doubt, phrase questions like a child would ask them.

Steve Carell, playing Michael Scott from “The Office” (2005–13) trying hard to be polite enough

4. Shorter the answers, the better: Answers should be in three sentences or less. One sentence is ideal, but sometimes it may not provide enough clarity. If you cannot go below 3–4 sentences, use bullet points. Visuals and video links can be more effective than plain text.

5. Consider having different FAQs in each page: Many companies have one page for all FAQs irrespective of topics they belong to. From the reader point of view, navigating through miles of questions can definitely get annoying. More so on a mobile screen. Websites with best UX design usually have a small set of FAQs on different pages such as Pricing, How it works, etc. in addition to a dedicated FAQ page.

6. Keep your FAQs updated: Your business is constantly evolving, which makes it important to keep your content updated as well. This becomes especially important for companies in SaaS (where product layout is prone to change), financial services (where regulations keep changing) and education (where change in academic year can mean updating several data points).

7. Have an exit intent trigger: Lastly, your list of FAQs will never be exhaustive. To make sure that you are addressing all FAQs together, an effective way is to ask your visitors. We have seen marketers use an exit intent trigger to ask users what they could not find in the webpage. Users then ask the question in a search box or a chat widget, and get redirected to the correct page where their question is answered. Websites using this method have seen over 20% of their traffic bounce back and get re-engaged. Airim can help you implement this on your page within seconds.