Why are FAQs a must-have in content marketing?

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) have been a common feature on websites for many years. While they’ve always been helpful for directing visitors to key information quickly, USDP maintains that the current search ecosystem, combined with the increasing importance of online trust and transparency, have made them a must-have for every website.

That’s a bold statement, so let’s examine why that is and how you can use FAQs to transform your marketing.

What is the point of FAQs?

To put it simply, FAQs are important because most businesses are not transparent enough to meet the demands of the modern customer.

What does this mean?

The accessibility of information through smart devices, search enhancements, and the development of AI has created the expectation that every askable question should have an answer that is quickly accessible online. Therefore, holding back the answers to “buying questions” until scheduled sales discussions is no longer a competitive strategy.

An FAQ section is the web’s simplest and most direct way to answer a question. Building a straightforward FAQ section does 3 things:

1. Gives your audience an easy way to find exactly what they are looking for.
2. Gives AI agents a playbook for accurately citing information about your company.
3. Gives your sales team a new tool to qualify quicker and convert more.

What sort of questions should you answer?

Your FAQs should address the most important questions that your customers have. These can be broken down into a few categories:

Buying questions

These are the questions people ask to figure out whether or not your products or services are right for them. These questions show buying intent, and if you do not provide a clear answer, your deals will rarely close. Your sales team should be able to easily assemble a list for your most frequently asked buying questions, but here are a few examples to get you started:

• “How much do your products or services cost?”
• “What is it like to work together?”
• “What does success look like?”
• “What is the return on investment?”

Contingency questions

A key part of transparency is being upfront about what happens when things don’t go as expected. Honestly answering these questions can prove your trustworthiness and help your customers choose you more confidently. Questions of this sort can include:

• “What is your return policy?”
• “What happens if we decide that we no longer want to work with you?”
• “What are the financial implications of backing out?”

Comparison questions

Comparison questions in your FAQ list allow you to quickly differentiate yourself from the competition. When answered honestly, comparison questions give your audience more reason to trust you, helping you to win more of the right customers. Sample questions might be:

• “How is your company different from Company X?”
• “How does your pricing compare to the competition?”

Industry questions

Your FAQ section can also be used to answer your customers’ biggest questions about your industry or discipline while also showing off your expertise. You can think of these FAQs as an extension of your blog focused solely on question and answer content. If done intentionally, this approach is a highly-effective tactic for SEO and AI optimization.

Check out our FAQ page for examples of what this looks like for our industry.

How should questions be formatted?

While simply having the answers to these questions on your website is a fantastic start, there are some formatting and technical best-practices you can follow to potentially magnify their impact.

Short and direct answers

FAQs are popular because of their efficiency, so be sure to lean into this by making your answers as short and to-the-point as possible. This is also a key best practice for answer engine optimization.

Additional long-form answer pages

In addition to the short answers on your main FAQ page, it is also beneficial to have in-depth answer pages (just like the one you are currently reading) that expand on the short answer in great detail. These pages are excellent tools for sorting your casual browsers from qualified, intentional buyers. They are also extremely helpful for expanding your SEO/AIO content library.

Clear headings

Clear headings are important for both the visitors to your website and the search engine and AI crawlers that lead them there. Give the questions in your FAQ section a heading tag (e.g. H2, H3) that is appropriate for where they occur on the page. Depending on how your FAQ section is constructed, it also may be appropriate to wrap short answers in heading tags, though more than likely, they will be in paragraphs.

What are technical best practices?

Beyond great content and correct formatting, use these technical best practices to maximize the effectiveness of your FAQ section.

Schema Markup

Both search engines and AI heavily use structured data to identify useful information on a website. The dominant format for this is Schema Markup, a collaborative structured data vocabulary created by Schema.org. While Schema markup has classifications for many different parts of a website, there are two schema types to know when working on FAQs:

• FAQPage is the schema type for pages that list multiple frequently asked questions along with their corresponding answers.
• QAPage is the schema type for pages that contain the answer(s) to a singular question (such as the page you are currently reading).

How should you get started?

If you currently have no FAQs on your website and need a place to start, begin gathering a list of common buying questions from your sales team, then formulate compelling answers that can be shared on your website.

If you don’t have FAQ formatting built into your website, don’t let that stop you. You can get started by simply writing long-form answer pages as blog posts. Even this will make a huge difference.

If you’re ready to have a digital marketing team improve your website and optimize your new FAQs, get in touch with us. Before we do any work, we will offer free advice to help you be sure your FAQ strategy is up to par.

To learn more about the role of question-and-answer content in your marketing, check out our own FAQs. We practice what we preach and answer your biggest questions there.