Clients and customers are bound to have a few questions about your products, services, or company.
While we want to try and answer those questions in our web copy, blog posts, and content, it can sometimes be difficult for audience members to find the exact answers to their questions.
If they need to browse too much or it takes too long to find an answer, they may leave your website.
That’s why you need an FAQ page locked and loaded, ready to go.
An FAQ, or Frequently Asked Questions, page is a dedicated page on your website that allows visitors to find answers to all their questions in one place.
via GIPHYNot only does it make life easier for your website visitors, but it can save your company time and resources because you don’t have as many clients contacting you for answers.
Your FAQs can save you a lot of time, resources, and potential frustration when done correctly. There are quite a few perks to building one, but we’ve listed some of the greatest ones below:
Our clients and customers are busy people. They simply don’t have time to browse through web page after web page or post after post to find information about who you are, what you provide, and how much your products or services cost.
They want to immediately know whether or not you’re a right fit for them. An FAQ page helps you put all these basic answers in one place, saving your customers time.
Having just one page of questions isn’t the only way an FAQ page can benefit you and your clients or customers.
An FAQ page also means that visitors with questions don’t need to send you an email or call your office to get a question answered.
This helps you free up time and prevents you from needing to send similar messages over and over.
Personality is important for creating relationships with your audience members. While you want your personality to shine through throughout your entire website, your FAQ page is another place where you can get creative.
The questions that you answer on your FAQ page should be helpful, but that doesn’t mean you can’t throw something silly in here and there — just make sure it aligns with your brand.
Appropriately using keywords throughout your website is important for boosting your SEO and improving your online ranking.
The more ways you can effectively use keywords on your website, the better your SEO will be. An FAQ page is one way to improve your SEO, include new long-tail keywords, and improve your website traffic.
Establishing trust with your target audience is important for convincing them to purchase from you.
An FAQ page helps you establish trust because it shows you understand the complications and issues your target audience may be facing and you’re willing to help them through those challenges.
It also shows that you’re public about your answers and you’re not trying to hide or conceal anything.
This question doesn’t have a straightforward answer, unfortunately. It depends on your market and your customers.
If your organization prioritizes customer service, then a full support center is a good idea. These “help desks” act as the middleman before your customers reach out to a service rep. You’ll want to host a thorough knowledge management system, FAQ included, in this case.
For product or service-focused companies, then you’ll find it’s best to include a link to a simplistic FAQ page in your navigation. This allows customers to dissolve any purchasing hesitations they may have on their own.
Other places where a link to your FAQ page can live include:
It all depends on what makes sense for your customers’ user experience.
It’s not as difficult as it may sound if you know what your customers are asking about most. Your page can, and honestly should, be simple, so you don’t need to be incredibly design-heavy with it.
Just follow these simple steps to build an FAQ page that will serve your customers well.
A common mistake companies make is to build a list of questions that they think customers/prospects want answers for. That often ends in a useless page.
Collect actual questions from your customers via surveys, recorded service calls, and what your customer service reps report as issues that come up frequently.
You can also collect info from your sales department to understand what common questions your prospects are asking once they contact sales.
Your page will then be full of information relevant to your customers' & prospects' needs.
This seems kind of obvious, but you must structure your FAQ answers well. This is the page that your customers are going to look for to find solutions to their problems. They'll expect actionable answers to their questions.
Your answers should be concise, digestible, and accurate. The goal is to answer that specific question and avoid any extraneous details.
If they're not clear, then your customers are going to wind up calling your service reps anyway, making the point of your FAQ a moot point.
Whether it be a table of contents with jump links or collapsible windows, you should always offer your customers some way of easily navigating the page.
Let's be honest, no one wants to scroll a million times to find the one relevant question they're looking for.
By providing a navigation system, you can keep your page clean and organized.
Calling back to where you should place your FAQ, make sure you do your research on where makes the most sense for both your website and your customers.
There isn't a reason for you to hide the page, especially if you have a complex product or service.
via GIPHYMake the FAQ link, CTA button, or menu option obvious or easy to locate on your website. You can even place several links throughout your website on appropriate pages if your site is large enough to warrant it.
After the page has gone live, you should analyze its usefulness regularly to find out if you need to optimize it or not.
Track user traffic, session times, and whether there's a decrease in service tickets or not. Are your service reps noticing a difference in what customers are calling about? Have they experienced a decrease in frequently asked questions?
As you gather metrics, optimize and update your page as necessary. Maybe you need to add some new questions or perhaps you need to place the link somewhere customers can access it easier.
It's always smarter to adapt and pivot to meet your customers' needs rather than remain static and unhelpful.
Even though you'll have some questions specific to your brand, products, services, pricing, and more, there are still some pretty standard ones that everyone experiences.
They fall under different categories too, so it all depends on your industry.
Of course, there are a ton of different ways to add more value to your FAQ page. Here are just a few best practices to follow to really up the ante.
Add a button to each question that will link back to a blog, a content offer, or the Contact Us page if there’s no additional insight into that particular question.
This will prove to the prospect that you are always looking out for their best interest.
Since most prospects would much rather do their research before speaking to a sales representative, you should provide them with a quick means of asking those questions.
via GIPHYThis should be a simple form that only requires their email address and a message field.
As they ask these questions, provide them with said answers via email along with a link for a more in-depth answer. After which, add these questions to your FAQ page for future prospects if the question/answer doesn’t already exist.
This will not only potentially improve your page authority but also help your sales team close future deals.
If there’s a question that sales or marketing realize prospects are interested in knowing the answer to, then consider writing a blog or creating a content offer to help those prospects find a more thorough answer to their question.
Keep in mind that your ultimate objective is to be that source of information for your prospects to help build trust between both parties.
If you have a large set of questions on the page, add an option to help users quickly filter the questions and answers.
It’s true that the faster a prospect can find what they are looking for on your website, the more likely they are to recommend your site to a friend.
As you title each question on the page, ensure you’re using proper keywords so the content can be easily found in Google searches.
There are some really impressive FAQ pages out there. Almost as many as there are poorly organized and designed ones.
We picked out some of the best so you can reference for what to do right. Each one has a unique feature or format that you can draw inspiration from.
Source: YouTube
Leave it to the company behind the world's most popular search engine to create a top-class FAQs page. The YouTube help page provides not just quick links to some of the most frequently-asked questions platform users have—it also has a search feature that allows them to type in their questions to find a relevant article or video.
Source: Dropbox
Rather than listing questions, Dropbox allows users to search for answers on their help page. This allows them to browse through many different questions that have already been asked to find the right one to fit their needs.
This ensures their visitors can find the answers they need without needing to contact the company for help directly. However, there are still categories with quick links to articles focused on specific question types.
Source: VAT19
The FAQ section for VAT19’s giant inflatable soccer ball is a good example of a company that decided to have fun with the questions they’ve been getting.
By first addressing that it is a real product, they set the tone as lighthearted and fun. They then go a bit deeper into questions regarding prices, durability, and other important things to know. And it’s all integrated into the product’s page!
Source: Zappos
Using the actual questions that someone may ask as the headers for your FAQ page like Zappos does can allow you to rank when that question is typed into a search engine.
This can improve your SEO, help you rank higher in a search engine results listing and bring more traffic to your website.
Source: Bank of America
Banks are just one industry that might use an FAQ page to build trust with their target audience.
On Bank of America’s help page, they answer a variety of questions about personal and business loans, checking accounts, and saving accounts. These can all help stressed-out customers find the solutions they need.
Additionally, the Bank of America site opens with a question about where the visitor is located to ensure that the FAQs provide information accurate to the visitor's geographic area.
Source: UPS
UPS includes a set of FAQs at the bottom of many of the pages on its website. Each set of FAQs is tailored to the content of the page they're found on. For example, the screen cap above highlights questions found on the tracking support page and cover things like when packages will be delivered, how to track packages, and what to do if a package marked "delivered" cannot be found.
This puts FAQ resources where they will be useful to website visitors as they navigate the UPS website.
Source: First Direct
Here's a straightforward FAQ page that presents the most frequently asked questions at the top of the screen in big bold sections, then breaks down the rest of the FAQs in segmented topics by category.
These FAQs go beyond just covering First Direct's online banking service to help consumers with personal finance topics such as money management, fraud prevention, and what to do with your bank accounts during a separation. There's even a chatbot on the page to help visitors find additional help.
FAQ pages are helpful to companies in just about every industry.
Consider what questions your target audience may have about your products or services, what information they may be looking for, and what decisions they may need to make before they make a purchase.
Include all this information and anything else you feel will provide value to your customers on your page.