Frequently Asked Questions. We all get them in our businesses. But are we making the best use of them in our content, marketing and sales funnels?

In this article, I take a look at why FAQs are such a useful tool for your business, and how to create and use a great set of FAQs that will help your customers (and Google!) to know, like and trust you.

Why an FAQ Page is a Great Addition to Your Website

The primary goal of Frequently Asked Questions (or FAQs) is to help your customers to buy from you.

But when you curate them carefully, they can also help your business in other ways.

An FAQ page is worth the effort because -

It helps your customers

When you answer their questions upfront, you’re showing that you know who they are, and that you understand their problem.

It helps you deliver great customer service right from the start, and gives customers an easy way to answer the questions that might be making them hesitate in making a purchase.

It helps Google

Having clearly answered questions to things that are relevant to your industry, service or product gives Google a great understanding of what your business is about.

And the more Google understands what you do, and how you fit into what users are searching for on the web, the better your organic search ranking will be for the keywords that matter to you.

It helps you!

You’re in a small to medium business. Do you have time to answer the same questions over and over again?

Having a useful set of FAQs on your website takes some of the pressure off your sales process by helping customers to answer the most common questions themselves. Then, when they get in touch with you, they’re primed and ready to find out how to work with you.

The more uncertainty you can remove, the faster the pathway to sales – whether you’re in products or services.

How To Write Great FAQs

There’s plenty of great reasons to write a set of FAQs for your business. But how do you do it in a way that really helps your customers, and optimises the content for search engines?

Here’s my tips for writing useful, informative and effective FAQs.

Use the actual questions your customers ask

Use the actual questions your customers ask as well as ones that you think they might like to know the answer to.

Your customers will be asking questions all the time: before, during and after you’ve made the sale.

Keep track of them in a way that works for you. Use a spreadsheet or a project management tool to capture all the questions your customers ask.

Great places to look for FAQ material are –

During the Sales Process
What are the common questions that come up during the sales process?
Using Customer Service Data
What do customers routinely ask your customer service team (even if that’s you!)? Look over emails, support tickets and other customer service data for insights.
Comments or Questions on Social Media
Your potential customers are looking for answers on social media all the time.

Join groups relevant to your industry or product, and start listening!! What questions do you hear that would make perfect FAQ content?
Use a tool like AnswerThePublic
Created by SEO legend Neil Patel, this is the ultimate tool for discovering the type of content your audience is searching for and the questions they're asking about your topic.

Type in your topic keywords, and AnswerThePublic will give you 60 suggestions for content to create related to those keywords - that people are actually searching for.

And all the answers are delivered as questions. Amazing!

(Top Tip – you can use this tool to help you find good long form content topics to incorporate into your Blog or Videos too).

Optimise with Keywords

To optimise the performance of your FAQ page, make sure you optimise both your questions and answers with keyword research.

It takes a bit more time, but it will repay you in the long run by helping your business be more visible in organic search results.

Use your customers words where possible.

Optimisation is important – but you need to balance this with serving your customer. And you’ll deliver your best on this when you use the words of your customer wherever possible.

This is a good rule, not just for your FAQs, but for every piece of messaging you create.

How do they phrase their problem? What words do they use?

Don’t forget to consider where they are on their customer journey, and address the question in a way that’s going to make sense to them based on their knowledge right now.

Keep answers clear and concise

Despite what you might think, less is actually more when it comes to FAQs.

Make sure that your answers are clear, concise and actually answer the question.

Don’t bulk up your answer for the sake of search engines. Put the customer first and make it easy for them to find and understand the answer.

If you can’t answer it in a paragraph or so, it might be better to tackle the question as a blog article or video, and then push to that piece of content from your FAQs.

Make sure they’re organised

Some businesses will have just a short list of FAQs.

But some businesses will have the need for LOTS. This is common with FAQ pages for software and other complex products.

Whichever category you fall into, make sure you carefully consider how your FAQs should be arranged on the page.

Should you create categories rather than one long page of answers? Should your FAQs be searchable? Will you use an accordion, drop-down style to reveal answers to the questions, or is something else more suited to the amount of content you have?

How to Use FAQs in Your Business

Once you’ve written your FAQs, there are plenty of ways you can use them in your business to help build trust with your customers.

As a dedicated page on your website

If people have a question as they’re reading your website content, they’ll naturally look for an FAQ page.

Make it easy to find by putting it in the footer or the main menu (or both if that works for your FAQs).

And don’t forget to keep it regularly updated.

On specific products

If you’ve got a product based business, then you’ll have FAQs that are relevant to specific products.

Make sure these appear on the product listing on your website, with more general FAQs appearing on their own page.

On landing pages

If you’re selling a course, masterclass or webinar, then including an FAQ section on your sales landing page is an excellent way to get people to feel confident in their purchase and click the register or buy now button.

In customer quotes

When you’re putting together a quote for a customer, including your FAQs as a page in your proposal can help alleviate pressure on your sales process and get in front of any concerns your customer might have before they sign off.

As part of the shopping cart

Now, you don’t want to clutter your shopping cart with unnecessary information, but if you’ve got important shipping, product or delivery questions your customer might want answered, then putting some select FAQs either during, or at the end of the shopping cart process will enhance your customer experience.

Consider if you should answer the question elsewhere

Once you’ve got a list of FAQs and created answers for them, make sure you check where else those answers could be useful for your customers.

While it’s great to include them directly on an FAQ page, they aren’t just for your website.

If you get regular questions from customers, make sure you’re answering these directly in your sales and marketing material, which includes on your About Page, in your quote documentation, on receipts or invoices, and in brochures, lead magnets and other marketing.

FAQs are a great way to earn customer trust

Frequently Asked Questions are a great way to earn the trust of your customer – but they need to be useful, well laid out and create clarity to be effective.

But when you take the time to give great answers to great questions, you’ll help your customer buy from you, you’ll help Google find you, and you’ll take pressure off your sales process so you can get more of the right client doing business with you.