There is no doubt that FAQ’s help in increasing the search engine rankings because Google values your website for the data you offer. Search engines and people love the FAQ pages. Why? Because these pages show that you care for your customers.
With a great FAQ landing page, you can increase your customer experience. Also, your online visibility will increase People will also find you outside of your website. You can directly respond to the needs of your target audience.
This is also another reason why voice search is becoming so much popular these days. FAQ content can generate a wide range of targeted traffic to your website. In a lot of cases, business owners use it as a good content marketing strategy.
In this blog today, we are going to share the 5 simple steps to create a well-optimized FAQ page for search engines.
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Creating an SEO-driven strategy
While making an SEO strategy, it is important to identify the important search trends. You have to know how your customers are framing their questions. Find out which questions are most interesting to them and which are more popular than others.
Start with semantic research with a text optimizer tool to find out the related concepts behind any search query. This will make things easy for you. You can understand the customer search patterns, break questions, and create more subtopics.
While you type on the Google search bar, do not forget to check the Google-Suggest section. This will give you a lot of suggestions. You can use Ahrefs to get more questions from Google-Suggest results. An easy way is to use the filters to find the most popular questions. Then you can create similar topics and follow similar search patterns.
Also, make use of Google’s ‘People Also Ask’ feature. This is a good source to collect information on important search queries. Did you know that your competitor can be a good source of information? Run your competitor’s FAQ URL through the tools to see which questions can generate more organic visibility.
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Organizing the questions
This is a very important step. The tools will offer you a lot of data to work with. However, not all the questions will be worth using in your website’s FAQ section. Thus, you have to organize them. Use spreadsheets to note down the queries according to their dates.
The goal is to find out the following:
- The main subtopics behind the questions. It could be related to price, DIY, or any general questions.
- You can also opt for the closely related questions. However, make sure that you don’t clutter the FAQ pages by answering the same questions.
- Use questions that match the various content personas. You can create templates where you can attribute search queries for identified content personas.
- Question groups with similar search intent that will help your audience to learn more about a topic. Questions that might lead to a purchase and questions that are similar to your brand or your competitor’s brand.
These will help you in formatting your FAQ pages into the sections and it will increase visibility. A well-structured FAQ page increases visibility. Also, there are some WordPress plugins that can help you in organizing your FAQ page in different sections.
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Using the FAQ page schema
The Google snippets depend mostly on the use of so-called schema or the structured markup that help the search engines in extracting the necessary information. For the FAQ rich snippets, there is a structured markup which is called FAQPage schema.
To make things easier, choose a proper website development service and install a WordPress Plugin that will help you in using the schema on any of the pages. With the plugin installed, when uploading any of your content to the WordPress, you can select the ‘IMN FAQ Block’ to markup questions and answer with the FAQ Page schema.
Another good thing about this plugin is, it prompts you in marking up each question with H2 or H3 subheading. This is what Google uses to find answers for questions inside the People Also Ask feature. By using this plugin, you can optimize for both organic search opportunities.
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Adding internal links inside every answer
This is a very important step for the search engine optimization that is overlooked a lot of times. Google will show your answers inside the rich snippet, yet they will appear so conclusive that the searchers will never click to the site.
To avoid this problem, you can add internal links in every answer. You can see these in-answer links in the organic search so that the searchers might be more inclined to click on them.
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Creating a clickable table of contents
To make the FAQ page easier to navigate for your audience, you can publish a summary of the major sections. This will be like a table of contents. If you did step 2 successfully and created a structure on the actual searching pattern, this will give you another organic search advantage.
These are like “jump-to” links which will take the searchers to the part of the FAQ page that they find interesting. A well-organized FAQ page that includes a clickable table of content will make the page easy to navigate.
Highlight the TOC in the left column so that the questions are highlighted. To get this done, you have to create an anchor link for every question. In the TOC, you hyperlink every question to the corresponding anchor link.
In conclusion, it can be said that Google is always coming up with new sections and elements. This helps in creating better, information-rich, and more interactive search results. If you can maintain a flexible SEO plan and adapt your tactics to the newest changes, you will experience better organic search visibility.
Getting more organic opportunities is easy with a well-structured and well-optimized FAQ section. This will help you in achieving many more goals due to better user engagement and more conversions.
