SEO
FAQ Pages for SEO (+ Examples & Best Practices)
FAQ pages (when done well) can be a double win: They provide valuable content that users want to see and Google wants to rank.
However, when rushed, FAQs can easily become lazy data dumps of loosely linked questions and half-baked answers.
Don’t be the latter. Instead, create useful FAQ pages for humans and search engines.
In this guide, you will learn the following:
An FAQ (frequently asked questions) page is a place on a website where common questions related to your niche can be answered.
It often looks a little something like this:
But they can also look like this:
A good FAQ page can help people at different stages of the buyer’s journey and can act as the first point of contact for potential customers.
But what about SEO? Are FAQ pages beneficial?
I’m glad you asked.
Are FAQ pages good for SEO?
Like 90% of SEO questions, the answer is… it depends.
A half-thought-out FAQ page that is essentially just a dump of questions exported from a keyword tool and quickly answered on a page may not be the best way to leverage FAQ pages for SEO.
However, when optimized for relevant keywords and well designed in terms of UX, FAQ pages can be great for SEO.
In fact, the goal of an FAQ page is the same as the core goal of SEO: to provide the best answer to a question.
There are actually quite a few ways to display your FAQ pages, although they all have the same goal: to answer common questions a user may have and present them clearly.
In terms of FAQ pages for SEO, I am going to split them into five different types:
- Homepage
- Product/service page
- Dedicated FAQ page
- Standalone blog post
- Within a blog post
Let’s take a brief look at each (along with examples):
1. Homepage FAQs
This is one of the most obvious ones: an FAQ section on the homepage—usually just above the footer:
Not only does this add some contextual information to the homepage, but it also creates a useful place to add internal links:
Clicking on the question accordion opens up the answer along with internal links to more in-depth answers (via blog posts).
2. Product/service page FAQs
This time, the FAQ section is added to a product/service page:
These questions are typically related to the offering and are designed to cut down on customer service requests.
3. Dedicated FAQ page
If you’ve got a lot of questions to cover or just want to keep FAQs separate, you may want to have a dedicated FAQ page:
If you’ve got the design skills, designing a good-looking page can be a good link building tactic, as the page can get referenced on design blogs:
4. Standalone blog post with FAQs
You can keep it simple and display your FAQs in a blog post format, using subheadings for each question.
Do keyword research to find a list of questions on a topic (more on that later) and publish the questions as their own “FAQ” blog post.
If you drop that page into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, you can see it is performing pretty well:
This method works better when you have a few questions. If you have a lot of content to cover, it may make more sense not to have a super long FAQ blog post answering everything.
5. Dedicated FAQ section at the end of a post
If you want to go the blog post route, you don’t have to create a new one. You can add the FAQ section to an existing article (if it makes sense to do so):
Speaking of topic clusters… this can also be a natural way of adding more internal links to related content.
Include an FAQ section in your article, answer the questions briefly, and then link out to supporting articles where you go into more detail.
Boom! You’ve just built a useful FAQ page AND a topic cluster at the same time. Go you.
Before you start building your page, you need to know what questions to answer. The aim of an FAQ page is to provide the best answers to these questions.
Here are some methods to find FAQs to answer:
1. Research what questions users are asking
Some of the best sources of questions are NOT keyword tools—but people.
And ideally, that’s people in your audience.
One of the most effective ways of researching what questions to include in an FAQ page is by simply asking your customers/users/audience.
Here are some things you can try:
- Customer service – Check in with your customer support/sales teams and simply ask them about common questions customers keep asking
- Site search – See if your site has an internal search function; if so, check what kind of things people are searching for
- Google Search Console – Look at GSC queries to see what question-based phrases are getting clicks
- People Also Ask – Check related PAA boxes on the SERPs
- Quora and Reddit – See what common questions are being discussed in online communities in your niche
2. Find questions with Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
If you are building an FAQ page for SEO, you really can’t avoid doing keyword research.
Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and drop in a seed keyword. Obviously, you want to pick a seed that relates to the topic you want to answer questions about.
Then go to the Matching terms report and turn on the Questions filter:
From here, you’ll have a list of questions related to your seed term.
If you use a broad seed like [pizza], you will generate a lot of potential questions:
If you want to generate more specific questions, just use a more focused seed keyword. For example, if you follow the same method for “apple airpod,” you’ll get fewer results but more relevant questions:
3. Reverse engineer competitors with Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
This time, we are going to use competitor sites as a source of questions.
Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, drop in a competitor domain, and then go to the Organic keywords report:
From here, you’ll want to filter out non-question keywords. Using Ahrefs’ built-in filters is pretty easy.
Inside the Organic keywords report, click on the Keyword filter and add in some modifiers.
Question modifiers: what, where, when, why, which, who, whose, how, etc.
Make sure the filter is set to Contains and Any value. Then click “Apply.”
Now you’ll have a list of keywords containing the question modifiers from above:
Building an SEO-friendly FAQ page is no different from building any content-heavy page.
It needs to be easy to navigate, be quick to load, nail on-page SEO, etc.
That said, here are a few points you should consider when creating your own FAQ page:
- Group your questions – By organizing your questions into categories, you provide a better overall UX.
- Avoid jargon – You should use language your audience will understand.
- Use your brand personality/tone of voice/style guide – An FAQ page is no different from any other content on your site, so keep it consistent.
- Answer questions clearly and concisely – Your FAQ page should answer questions quickly. If you want to go into more detail, save that for long-form blog posts.
- Keep it updated – FAQs are not static pages, so be sure to add new questions and update older questions regularly.
- Internal linking – It’s valuable to add internal links to any related content or resources that may lead the user down the conversion funnel.
- Format for UX – Good UX makes it easy for users to find the answers they are looking for.
- Optimize your title tags – You can make searchers aware of the FAQ.
- Use FAQ schema – Adding schema markup to your page can help you earn additional SERP real estate.
Speaking of FAQ schema… it’s a point worth expanding on.
FAQ schema markup is a type of structured data to make your pages eligible to have rich snippets on the SERPs.
These FAQ rich snippets can help increase click-through rates (source), help Google crawl your site, and claim more SERP real estate.
Adding FAQ schema markup to your site is pretty straightforward.
Step 1. Create your FAQs
First up, you need some actual questions to mark up.
Create a dedicated FAQ page or an FAQ section on one of your pages. Now populate it with questions and then answer them.
When marking up, be sure to follow Google’s guidelines:
Step 2. Write and validate your FAQ schema
You can use JSON-LD or Microdata to create FAQ markup, but Google recommends JSON-LD.
If you want to keep things simple, use a free online FAQ schema generator:
Simply copy and paste your questions and answers into the generator, and the FAQ schema code will be automatically generated for you.
Learn from my (many) schema mistakes here: pay close attention to your code.
The code on your page and the code in your script need to be the same. If they are different (even by one little misplaced comma), then your markup won’t work.
To check your FAQ schema, simply copy and paste the code and run it through Google’s Rich Results Testing Tool.
Step 3. Implement and validate (again)
Now you need to implement your markup onto your page. You’ve got a few options here:
- Manually add the script into the <head> section of the page
- Add via a WordPress plugin (like Insert Headers and Footers or RankMath)
- Add via Google Tag Manager
- Add into your WordPress theme’s function.php file
Sidenote.
If you don’t know what you are doing here, save yourself some potential headaches and go for option #1 or #2.
The final step—once your FAQ schema has been added—is to test if it is working. Copy and paste the URL of your page and run it through Google’s Rich Results Testing Tool. Also, check your page in GSC to verify any errors/warnings.
PRO TIP
Two actionable FAQ schema tips
Firstly, a big thank you to Dave Ojeda for reviewing the above schema process and checking for errors.
And if that wasn’t already enough, Dave “Schema Wizard” Ojeda also gave me not one but two actionable FAQ schema tips:
- FAQ answers accept HTML – This means you can add internal links to your answers and send people to conversion-focused pages or key content pages.
- UTM tracking – When you hyperlink an answer with HTML, you can also add UTM tracking to see who clicks from the SERPs.
Now it’s time to get meta. Here are some frequently asked questions about FAQs:
How many questions should an FAQ section have?
Enough to be useful.
Personally, I believe that your FAQs should try to answer every relevant question.
This is going to depend on a lot of factors, such as the niche you are in. But however many useful questions there are, you should aim to answer them all in your FAQ section.
What should be included on an FAQ page?
Questions—that are asked frequently… and then answered.
The definition (from the start of this article) is:
An FAQ (frequently asked questions) page is a place on a website where common questions related to your niche can be answered.
So that’s what you should include on an FAQ page.
What are the benefits of FAQ pages?
Still not convinced? Here are some more benefits. An FAQ page:
- Provides quick and concise answers (for users and Google).
- May help push potential customers toward purchasing/converting.
- Helps to build trust.
- Decreases the load on customer support (hopefully).
What is the difference between an FAQ and knowledge base?
FAQ pages generally cover the common questions, whereas a knowledge base covers everything you need to know.
A knowledge base or help center provides resources for every possible question about your product, service, or website. Examples include billing, troubleshooting, walkthroughs, etc.
Final thoughts
When you take the time to research questions people are actually asking, map them to relevant keywords, and display them on a UX-focused FAQ page, you’ve got a recipe for SEO success.
That may sound like a lot, but it can be neatly summed up like this:
To create a useful FAQ page, answer relevant questions that humans and search engines can understand.
Got a question about building FAQ pages for SEO? Tweet me.
SEO
Google’s Search Engine Market Share Drops As Competitors’ Grows
According to data from GS Statcounter, Google’s search engine market share has fallen to 86.99%, the lowest point since the firm began tracking search engine share in 2009.
The drop represents a more than 4% decrease from the previous month, marking the largest single-month decline on record.
U.S. Market Impact
The decline is most significant in Google’s key market, the United States, where its share of searches across all devices fell by nearly 10%, reaching 77.52%.
Concurrently, competitors Microsoft Bing and Yahoo Search have seen gains. Bing reached a 13% market share in the U.S. and 5.8% globally, its highest since launching in 2009.
Yahoo Search’s worldwide share nearly tripled to 3.06%, a level not seen since July 2015.
Search Quality Concerns
Many industry experts have recently expressed concerns about the declining quality of Google’s search results.
A portion of the SEO community believes that the search giant’s results have worsened following the latest update.
These concerns have begun to extend to average internet users, who are increasingly voicing complaints about the state of their search results.
Alternative Perspectives
Web analytics platform SimilarWeb provided additional context on X (formerly Twitter), stating that its data for the US for March 2024 suggests Google’s decline may not be as severe as initially reported.
From our data (Search Engine website category, US, March 2024) it doesn’t look like we’re there yet: pic.twitter.com/RBUJp4ZLeb
— Similarweb (@Similarweb) May 1, 2024
SimilarWeb also highlighted Yahoo’s strong performance, categorizing it as a News and Media platform rather than a direct competitor to Google in the Search Engine category.
Don’t underestimate Yahoo. They’re doing great. On our platform they’re categorized as News and Media, and hence not a direct competitor to Google in the Search Engine category. But they rank #10 worldwide, #6 in the US, and #1 in their category. Much higher than Bing and OpenAI. pic.twitter.com/O4yJu5QEK6
— Similarweb (@Similarweb) May 2, 2024
At the same time, Google is slightly declining 👀 pic.twitter.com/9i7paeU1QG
— Similarweb (@Similarweb) May 2, 2024
Why It Matters
The shifting search engine market trends can impact businesses, marketers, and regular users.
Google has been on top for a long time, shaping how we find things online and how users behave.
However, as its market share drops and other search engines gain popularity, publishers may need to rethink their online strategies and optimize for multiple search platforms besides Google.
Users are becoming vocal about Google’s declining search quality over time. As people start trying alternate search engines, the various platforms must prioritize keeping users satisfied if they want to maintain or grow their market position.
It will be interesting to see how they respond to this boost in market share.
What It Means for SEO Pros
As Google’s competitors gain ground, SEO strategies may need to adapt by accounting for how each search engine’s algorithms and ranking factors work.
This could involve diversifying SEO efforts across multiple platforms and staying up-to-date on best practices for each one.
The increased focus on high-quality search results emphasizes the need to create valuable, user-focused content that meets the needs of the target audience.
SEO pros must prioritize informative, engaging, trustworthy content that meets search engine algorithms and user expectations.
Remain flexible, adaptable, and proactive to navigate these shifts. Keeping a pulse on industry trends, user behaviors, and competing search engine strategies will be key for successful SEO campaigns.
Featured Image: Tada Images/Shutterstock
SEO
How To Drive Pipeline With A Silo-Free Strategy
When it comes to B2B strategy, a holistic approach is the only approach.
Revenue organizations usually operate with siloed teams, and often expect a one-size-fits-all solution (usually buying clicks with paid media).
However, without cohesive brand, infrastructure, and pipeline generation efforts, they’re pretty much doomed to fail.
It’s just like rowing crew, where each member of the team must synchronize their movements to propel the boat forward – successful B2B marketing requires an integrated strategy.
So if you’re ready to ditch your disjointed marketing efforts and try a holistic approach, we’ve got you covered.
Join us on May 15, for an insightful live session with Digital Reach Agency on how to craft a compelling brand and PMF.
We’ll walk through the critical infrastructure you need, and the reliances and dependences of the core digital marketing disciplines.
Key takeaways from this webinar:
- Thinking Beyond Traditional Silos: Learn why traditional marketing silos are no longer viable and how they spell doom for modern revenue organizations.
- How To Identify and Fix Silos: Discover actionable strategies for pinpointing and sealing the gaps in your marketing silos.
- The Power of Integration: Uncover the secrets to successfully integrating brand strategy, digital infrastructure, and pipeline generation efforts.
Ben Childs, President and Founder of Digital Reach Agency, and Jordan Gibson, Head of Growth at Digital Reach Agency, will show you how to seamlessly integrate various elements of your marketing strategy for optimal results.
Don’t make the common mistake of using traditional marketing silos – sign up now and learn what it takes to transform your B2B go-to-market.
You’ll also get the opportunity to ask Ben and Jordan your most pressing questions, following the presentation.
And if you can’t make it to the live event, register anyway and we’ll send you a recording shortly after the webinar.
SEO
Why Big Companies Make Bad Content
It’s like death and taxes: inevitable. The bigger a company gets, the worse its content marketing becomes.
HubSpot teaching you how to type the shrug emoji or buy bitcoin stock. Salesforce sharing inspiring business quotes. GoDaddy helping you use Bing AI, or Zendesk sharing catchy sales slogans.
Judged by content marketing best practice, these articles are bad.
They won’t resonate with decision-makers. Nobody will buy a HubSpot license after Googling “how to buy bitcoin stock.” It’s the very definition of vanity traffic: tons of visits with no obvious impact on the business.
So why does this happen?
There’s an obvious (but flawed) answer to this question: big companies are inefficient.
As companies grow, they become more complicated, and writing good, relevant content becomes harder. I’ve experienced this firsthand:
- extra rounds of legal review and stakeholder approval creeping into processes.
- content watered down to serve an ever-more generic “brand voice”.
- growing misalignment between search and content teams.
- a lack of content leadership within the company as early employees leave.
Similarly, funded companies have to grow, even when they’re already huge. Content has to feed the machine, continually increasing traffic… even if that traffic never contributes to the bottom line.
There’s an element of truth here, but I’ve come to think that both these arguments are naive, and certainly not the whole story.
It is wrong to assume that the same people that grew the company suddenly forgot everything they once knew about content, and wrong to assume that companies willfully target useless keywords just to game their OKRs.
Instead, let’s assume that this strategy is deliberate, and not oversight. I think bad content—and the vanity traffic it generates—is actually good for business.
There are benefits to driving tons of traffic, even if that traffic never directly converts. Or put in meme format:
Programmatic SEO is a good example. Why does Dialpad create landing pages for local phone numbers?
Why does Wise target exchange rate keywords?
Why do we have a list of most popular websites pages?
As this Twitter user points out, these articles will never convert…
…but they don’t need to.
Every published URL and targeted keyword is a new doorway from the backwaters of the internet into your website. It’s a chance to acquire backlinks that wouldn’t otherwise exist, and an opportunity to get your brand in front of thousands of new, otherwise unfamiliar people.
These benefits might not directly translate into revenue, but over time, in aggregate, they can have a huge indirect impact on revenue. They can:
- Strengthen domain authority and the search performance of every other page on the website.
- Boost brand awareness, and encourage serendipitous interactions that land your brand in front of the right person at the right time.
- Deny your competitors traffic and dilute their share of voice.
These small benefits become more worthwhile when multiplied across many hundreds or thousands of pages. If you can minimize the cost of the content, there is relatively little downside.
What about topical authority?
“But what about topical authority?!” I hear you cry. “If you stray too far from your area of expertise, won’t rankings suffer for it?”
I reply simply with this screenshot of Forbes’ “health” subfolder, generating almost 4 million estimated monthly organic pageviews:
And big companies can minimize cost. For large, established brands, the marginal cost of content creation is relatively low.
Many companies scale their output through networks of freelancer writers, avoiding the cost of fully loaded employees. They have established, efficient processes for research, briefing, editorial review, publication and maintenance. The cost of an additional “unit” of content—or ten, or a hundred—is not that great, especially relative to other marketing channels.
There is also relatively little opportunity cost to consider: the fact that energy spent on “vanity” traffic could be better spent elsewhere, on more business-relevant topics.
In reality, many of the companies engaging in this strategy have already plucked the low-hanging fruit and written almost every product-relevant topic. There are a finite number of high traffic, high relevance topics; blog consistently for a decade and you too will reach these limits.
On top of that, the HubSpots and Salesforces of the world have very established, very efficient sales processes. Content gating, lead capture and scoring, and retargeting allow them to put very small conversion rates to relatively good use.
Even HubSpot’s article on Bitcoin stock has its own relevant call-to-action—and for HubSpot, building a database of aspiring investors is more valuable than it sounds, because…
The bigger a company grows, the bigger its audience needs to be to continue sustaining that growth rate.
Companies generally expand their total addressable market (TAM) as they grow, like HubSpot broadening from marketing to sales and customer success, launching new product lines for new—much bigger—audiences. This means the target audience for their content marketing grows alongside.
As Peep Laja put its:
But for the biggest companies, this principle is taken to an extreme. When a company gears up to IPO, its target audience expands to… pretty much everyone.
This was something Janessa Lantz (ex-HubSpot and dbt Labs) helped me understand: the target audience for a post-IPO company is not just end users, but institutional investors, market analysts, journalists, even regular Jane investors.
These are people who can influence the company’s worth in ways beyond simply buying a subscription: they can invest or encourage others to invest and dramatically influence the share price. These people are influenced by billboards, OOH advertising and, you guessed it, seemingly “bad” content showing up whenever they Google something.
You can think of this as a second, additional marketing funnel for post-IPO companies:
These visitors might not purchase a software subscription when they see your article in the SERP, but they will notice your brand, and maybe listen more attentively the next time your stock ticker appears on the news.
They won’t become power users, but they might download your eBook and add an extra unit to the email subscribers reported in your S1.
They might not contribute revenue now, but they will in the future: in the form of stock appreciation, or becoming the target audience for a future product line.
Vanity traffic does create value, but in a form most content marketers are not used to measuring.
If any of these benefits apply, then it makes sense to acquire them for your company—but also to deny them to your competitors.
SEO is an arms race: there are a finite number of keywords and topics, and leaving a rival to claim hundreds, even thousands of SERPs uncontested could very quickly create a headache for your company.
SEO can quickly create a moat of backlinks and brand awareness that can be virtually impossible to challenge; left unchecked, the gap between your company and your rival can accelerate at an accelerating pace.
Pumping out “bad” content and chasing vanity traffic is a chance to deny your rivals unchallenged share of voice, and make sure your brand always has a seat at the table.
Final thoughts
These types of articles are miscategorized—instead of thinking of them as bad content, it’s better to think of them as cheap digital billboards with surprisingly great attribution.
Big companies chasing “vanity traffic” isn’t an accident or oversight—there are good reasons to invest energy into content that will never convert. There is benefit, just not in the format most content marketers are used to.
This is not an argument to suggest that every company should invest in hyper-broad, high-traffic keywords. But if you’ve been blogging for a decade, or you’re gearing up for an IPO, then “bad content” and the vanity traffic it creates might not be so bad.
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