What the FAQ? How to Use Most Frequently Asked Questions to Improve SEO
Frequently Asked Questions are a great way to help your customers understand your business. It’s not the end of the potential that lies within FAQs. Explore how they can help you improve SEO process in today’s entry. Let’s start!
Grow Your Search Engine Ranking with the Most Common Questions For Google
It’s been shown time and again that both search engines and web visitors, alike, appreciate and value Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) pages on the websites they visit. Why? If done properly, the pages provide important, valuable information and will help you find exactly what you need, which is a win-win scenario for everyone.
It’s good for your business, it’s good for a customer and good for Google’s algorithm which ranks and rewards websites based on their quality, usefulness, and relevance.
Beyond an improved web ranking, your website visitors could reward you by becoming a customer, signing up to your mailing list or becoming a follower on social media, so it’s a worthy investment. All these areas are connected under your SEO strategy and customer experience journey.
So, if you’ve ever wondered how to improve SEO and hope to apply this knowledge to your FAQs, read on.
How Do Search Engines Work?
As we’ve uncovered in an earlier article on understanding search engines, they sift through billions of pages of content to evaluate what is most relevant for any given search query.
If you’re specifically wondering how does Google work, it’s essentially the same process, considering more than 90% of online searches take place on Google [according to Business Insider] or its associated platforms, such as Google Images, Google Maps, and YouTube.
So, it’s clear that tailoring and in a sense signposting your quality content is the best way to stand out in searches, be rewarded by search engines and allow more customers to find you. Understanding SEO is key to this since it falls under the exact same strategy.
With the need for most businesses to develop a useful FAQ page, here are five simple steps you can take to ensure you not only respond to the common queries of your website visitors, but you make sure you are eligible for being rewarded by search engines in the process, in order to improve SEO.
Research Relevant FAQs
Of course, before you create this page, you want to research the most common and relevant questions your business encounters. If you’re not in a position to know these yourself right away, ask the person who receives customer emails, or takes customer phone calls. These could even be gathered through an online survey after customers make a transaction.
The FAQs can change over time, or more could be added, so make sure you continue research and ask for feedback from your customer-facing colleagues or online teams.
Also, keyword research best-practice and online tools can help detect the most popular keywords people are using around the web in relation to your business or industry. We can advise and support you on this as part of our efforts to improve SEO.
A Picture is a Thousand Words
As you start designing and implementing your new FAQ page, don’t just think in terms of a plain “question and answer” format, but other creative ways you can engage your visitors.
Alongside the text, sometimes a picture, infographic, or short video can grab the reader’s attention, illustrate a point or help them to better understand the answer to their query. Also, make sure you optimize your new and high-quality, compelling images with image alt tags and video tags to make sure they can be recognized by Google, or YouTube, and appear in relevant search engine results. For the strongest search engine optimization Google and others can offer, this is extremely important.
If you believe your website doesn’t generate enough traffic, broadly speaking, we wrote a handy guide explaining why this might be.
Choose Suitable Keywords
While answering a direct query, consider which similar words or phrases you could use to respond to your FAQs, while increasing your chances for the best search engine optimization. Using the right keywords will save a huge amount of time and effort in the long run.
By thinking like your customers, researching competitors, learning about keyword tools, and finding similar search terms – even implementing long-tail keywords – you can greatly optimize your content to earn the best visibility online. The result? You will boost your search engine ranking in a big way.
Use a Good Navigation Structure
Once the FAQ content is prepared, you still need to make sure your web visitors can find and navigate it. Particularly if this section is extensive and you have a lot of questions answered, or different questions covering many categories, consider having a search function or filter to find information by category. This should be a search bar or button separated from searching the rest of the site, so it stays focused on FAQ topics.
In short, this will help customers find relevant information faster, without becoming frustrated by scrolling or searching unsuccessfully for what they need. It also sits better with your SEO efforts since information will be much easier to filter and access, according to Google’s search algorithm. For the best search engine optimization, Google and others can provide, follow this process.
In fact, we’ve found that a good breadcrumb navigation structure, site-wide, is hugely important in SEO.
Stay Ahead with Analytics
After your new FAQ page is live, the work isn’t over. You need to regularly check on your website analytics to see how the page fares in search traffic volume, search engine ranking, how long visitors stay for (and whether the page appears to solve their queries or not), and any more actionable steps which could be taken.
By taking a proactive approach in finding the best tools to track website traffic, and how you use your analytics, you’ll constantly evolve and improve on your digital marketing and SEO output and how these align with other areas of your business.
There are, of course, many more steps you can take, depending on your experience and technical SEO knowledge but, if you’re simply working on how to improve SEO, this will serve as a great launchpad to get you started with your FAQs. Follow these steps and you’ll soon boost your search engine ranking.
As always, we are available as your go-to team in the area of long-tail SEO and performance-based advertising. If you’d like help as you work to improve SEO and develop your digital marketing strategy, please get in touch for a consultation to find out how we can help you.
