What is a FAQ?
FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions. FAQS have been around since at least 1648, when Matthew Hopkins wrote wrote The Discovery of Witches as a list of questions and answers. Today the FAQ has migrated to web, and hyperlinking along with consistent formatting makes it easy for spiders like the GoogleBot to crawl and index for use in its search results pages.
Why should your website include a FAQ?
As hinted above, Googlebot and other spiders like FAQs. A good FAQ is organized with headers in question format with text answers immediately following. FAQs often include a table of contents that helps users navigate to the information they’re seeking. Since Google is looking for well-organized information that is easy for users to find quickly, a FAQ is a natural way to help your users and Google understand what your website is about.
In fact, Google likes FAQs so much that it now includes FAQ results as rich text results. Here’s what that looks like:
Individuals can open the answer to that question, and get an answer fast as shown below:
The important part of this result for us is the link to dictionary.com in the opened answer. If you can get your website positioned in rich text results like this one, you can increase the number of times your website appears in the search results and give users more opportunities to visit your website. It’s all part of an SEO strategy that can help you beat your competitors.
What information should I include in my FAQ?
Writing a FAQ is the easiest type of writing you’ll do for web. Ask yourself
- What questions do my customers ask me most frequently?
- How is a customer likely to phrase their question?
- What information do customers need to know but often forget to ask?
- Is there technical information that is too long for inclusion on the rest of my website that can fit on a FAQ?
- How can I phrase this question positively?
- How can I use this FAQ to provide links to other important sections of my website?
In a FAQ you aren’t limited by space or attention spans of visitors as much as on other pages of your website, so you can include lots of information you wish you’d included elsewhere but didn’t.
A FAQ can be an important part of an SEO strategy to build internal links within your website and keep Googlebot crawling and learning about your website.
How do I structure my FAQ?
FAQs are usually structured using a table of contents with headers and text like this:
FAQ
How long does it take to build my website?
It will take about 5 weeks to complete your website on average, however, we can complete websites in as little as a four hours in emergency situations. We find the bottlenecks in web design are text or content-related. You can help Metro Nova Creative complete your website design faster by writing the text you’d like to appear on your website before we begin work.
How much does it cost to build a website?
A single-page, fully custom, mini-site starts at $1500. If you need a logo along with your mini-site, the cost is $2500. Larger websites are trickier to quote, so contact us to talk about your e-commerce, small business, or nonprofit website design.
Notice how the FAQ above includes important features for SEO like the hyperlinked table of contents, header tags that are correctly ordered hierarchically, and hyperlinks to pages throughout the website. By hierarchically ordered header tags, I mean that our header tag for FAQ is an <h3> tag, and the two question titles are <h4> tags to show they are subheaders.
Try Writing a FAQ Yourself!
Now that you know what a FAQ is, why they matter, what questions to ask yourself when writing a FAQ, and how to structure your FAQ for web, you’re ready to try writing a FAQ for yourself! I think you’ll find that writing with questions in mind helps write better content for your website.
