Your website visitors have questions. Lots of them. But how well is your FAQ page answering them? Guest writer Shawn Forno leaves no stone unturned in educating you how to create an FAQ page that commands attention, earns trust, and drives sales.
Right now, thousands of potential buyers in your niche are searching for the answer to very specific questions. Even more incredible, many of these people will buy or download the product that helps them solve that problem.
Knowing this, it’s truly shocking how few companies realize the value of a well-designed FAQ page.
Think about it. Why wouldn’t you want a page on your website that is perfectly designed to:
- Capture motivated users,
- Guide those users through your conversion funnel, and
- Scale over time—with almost zero additional investment?
FAQ pages address research and question-asking are two of the earliest phases in the buyer’s journey. And if you can interact with people during this formative stage, you’re that much closer to directing them into your sales funnel or even just outright converting them on the spot.
Build a better FAQ page—and start turning leads into buyers.
Fortunately, FAQs are some of the easiest content to produce—and they provide one of the clearest and most efficient paths to conversion on your site. Here are eight tips for creating a better FAQ page that actually answer your users’ most important questions.
1. Focus on What Matters
It seems obvious, but a lot of people ignore the “frequently” in an FAQ page. They spam users with hundreds of irrelevant questions grouped randomly in hopes of getting a little SEO boost. Or worse, they only feature a handful or slapped together questions with lackluster answers. Both are recipes for disaster.
A great FAQ page answers all of the most important and relevant questions users have about your product or industry, and nothing else. Create a tight, targeted list of questions and answers that provides value to potential buyers—and remove the chaff.
An FAQ page isn’t a catch-all bin crammed with keywords from your marketing team. And the minute you try to “game” an FAQ page, people can tell. Design your FAQ for people first and SEO second.
2. Keep It Short
The whole point of an FAQ page is to answer users’ commonly asked questions as fast as possible. Shorter answers keep users more engaged, and can prompt deeper engagement, and more time spent on the page.
When you bog users down with massive blocks of text, short attentions spans can create higher bounce rates and SEO penalties.
Shorter is always better. Keep your answers to one paragraph if you can—200 words or less. If you can answer a question with a sentence—or even a yes or no—do it. Then kick users to a blog post or dedicated landing page (via a keyword-specific embedded text link) that gives them further context and information.
Which leads to the next important FAQ tip…
3. Your FAQ is a Hub, Not a Finish Line
One of the best ways to build brand trust and loyalty is to respect users’ time with brief, straightforward answers to important questions. When you keep the answers on the FAQ page short, it invites more clicks to longer-form content that pulls visitors deeper into your content funnel—and thus further along the buyer’s journey.
So when you create your FAQ, use lots of internal links to additional content, and include a comprehensive table of contents at the top of the page to direct users to the questions that matter to them.
(If you want to go a little deeper, keep track of which questions get the most clicks—by tracking #anchor link instances—and bump these questions up in the order to make your FAQ page one of your biggest converting landing pages.)
Every click from the FAQ page to another page on your site is a big win. Build an FAQ page that invites users in after providing immediate value and you’ll make your FAQ page the flagship of your brand.
4. Organization Matters: FAQ Subheaders
There should be a natural progression to the questions on your FAQ page, starting with the most important/simplest/most asked, and then naturally building on those answers. Don’t start your page with super specific technical questions (unless that’s the most important thing you want buyers to know about).
It also helps to group questions together by topic under an obvious subheading. If you have a lot of questions about how to ship your product internationally or how to install your software on a mobile device, cluster those questions into their own subsection to corral users and answer more questions in a timely manner.
5. Prioritize Your FAQ Page
For some reason, many brands hide their FAQ page in their website footer or don’t even link to it all from their homepage. This is the opposite of what your FAQ is designed for.
Frequently asked question pages are a great welcome mat for new users and potential buyers that have done a bit of research, but aren’t quite ready to convert. The FAQ page is a low pressure way to expand your inbound funnel just a bit to convert even more leads with almost no effort on your part. It’s a static conversion driver that should be one of the first things users see when visiting your site—especially if you want to drive conversions.
So link to your FAQ page in the header navigation of your site. Make it obvious. Make it clickable. Make it part of how you greet new potential customers and announce that you’re here to answer every question or concern that they have before they sign up/add to cart/or register for your service.
(You can also add CTAs that link to your FAQ page in your email marketing, blog posts, and even direct and mail marketing. A well-tuned FAQ page is an evergreen conversion tool, and it should take pride of place on your site.)
6. Hone Your Tone
Now that you’ve decided to place your best foot forward with an FAQ page, it’s important to stick the landing with right tone for your particular brand. In fact, FAQ pages are one of the best ways to establish your brand’s look and feel with the language and responses you use in your answers to frequently asked questions.
You don’t have to answer every question like it’s an SAT prep course if that’s not what your site is all about. Make a joke, have fun, make a pun—it’s your page, and it should reflect the deeper messaging of your brand because odds are, the FAQ is one of the first interactions you will have with potential buyers. Take the time to get the perfect tone.
7. Use Related Search
Obviously you’ll have to start your FAQ page with your own list of questions. These should be keyword specific terms that you’re trying to rank for in both paid and organic search. And one of the best ways to create a massive list of valuable potential questions is to use Google’s “Related Search Queries”—aka the “People also ask” section of search results that drills into core keywords and search terms that relate to your niche.
When you type a search term into Google, you’ll almost always get a subsequent list of four or five additional related dropdown questions below the top search results. Click on these questions.
Expand each of these questions and track every query. These are the questions that Google has selected as the most frequently asked and the most related to your core niche. That’s free research from the largest search engine in the world. Use it.
8. Let Users Direct Your Questions
While the related search terms and additional questions are powerful research tools, it’s important to remember that your FAQ page isn’t just an SEO ranking tool.
The best FAQ pages are helpful, organically generated conversations with engaged users and potential buyers. That means your page needs to grow, change, and respond to actual customer questions and concerns as quickly as possible.
It’s important to loop your customer care and sales teams into the FAQ page as early as possible. Pull questions from support tickets and inbound emails. Make support teams and sales teams accountable for reporting user and customer questions on a regular monthly basis and add/change the questions and answers on your page accordingly.
Your users are literally telling you what they want to know before they decide to purchase your product or service. Listen to them. Answering real questions is one of the fastest and most efficient way to increase conversions without any additional investment.
Why do FAQ pages matter?
Top of the funnel blog posts, SEO, social media, and paid search are all great tools for raising awareness in your niche or industry. But one of the best ways to capture more qualified leads—that are closer to becoming actual buyers— is to focus on the most important (and “frequently asked”) questions and concerns that your users are having.
People are searching for solutions to their problems. The right FAQ page can be the perfect tool to engage buyers with your solution to their problem exactly when they’re looking for an answer.
