How do I write an FAQ article?

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Technical writing FAQs

3 min readSep 5, 2021

FAQ articles are the easiest type of help article to write, so it’s a great one to practice as a new technical writer. FAQ articles list a series of questions that customers commonly ask about a product or service. Each question is accompanied by an answer that is short and to the point. It has a simple 2-part writing structure that you repeat as many times as needed — question, answer.

Different from the other types of help articles, FAQs are less goal oriented. They are not meant to guide the reader to complete a task from start to finish. Their purpose is to give readers quick answers to their most common questions. A good product knowledge base will have FAQs on their homepage, so customers don’t have to dig through the entire website to find the answer they’re looking for. The Yoast knowledge base is a good example.

To write great FAQs, follow these steps:

1. Do some research

A crucial step in writing great FAQs is the research. Do some digging to uncover your customers’ most common questions when using your product or service. A few places you can look:

Customer surveys
Feedback from the sales team
App store reviews
Customer support tickets

2. Categorize your research

Once you’ve gathered some questions, look for common themes and start categorizing them accordingly. Some common categories:

Forgetting your password
Account settings
Payment methods

Consider creating a separate FAQ article for each category to make it easier for customers to find the information they are looking for.

3. Write the FAQ article

The structure looks like this:

Technical writing FAQs — How do I write an FAQ article?

Here are some writing best practices for each part of the structure:

The title

Use the format: [Subject] FAQs

Example: Return Policy FAQs

The introduction

The main purpose of the introduction is to assure the reader that they have landed on the right article. Briefly describe what the FAQs are about so they know they’ve found what they were looking for.

Example: Get answers to the most common questions about returning items to our store from the US or internationally.

Questions and answers

Use the material you gathered in the research step for this part. Read through the customer questions and pay attention to the words they use to describe your product or service. Write your FAQs using the same words as they use. This will help you create relatable FAQs that customers will understand.

For example, a customer might write something like “Why did your app charge me when I didn’t buy a plan.” Right away, you understand that they are referring to what you call the “auto-renewal feature.” For the purpose of clarity and friendliness, stick to their wording instead of modifying with your company’s internal terminology.

Here’s an example:

Why did your app charge me when I didn’t buy a plan?

It could be because you bought a plan in the past that was set to renew automatically. The charge you are seeing is for the renewal of your previous plan. You can check this by tapping Profile > Account > Purchase history. The details of your previous plans will appear, including if they were set to automatically renew.

This part is optional but recommended if you have more articles that are related to the same topic. List them at the bottom of your FAQ article to make them easily accessible for your readers.