The FAQ Page: Answering Real Customer Questions and Getting Found

Why do most FAQ pages achieve so little?

On many websites, the “FAQ” section contains a handful of questions such as “Why should I choose you?” or “What makes your company special?”. No customer asks such questions. They are advertising copy with question marks. Visitors notice quickly and leave, and search engines find nothing in them that anyone is searching for.

Yet businesses hear real questions every day: on the phone, in first conversations, in emails before a quote. This piece asks: How do you build an FAQ page that answers your customers’ real questions, saves visitors time and is found in search? To answer it, we first look at a model from research on information seeking on the web. Then we cover collecting the questions, writing the answers, organizing the page and its relationship to service pages and search engines.

A good FAQ page is the record of your first conversations, written down before the next one takes place.

The thinking model: information foraging and information scent

Information foraging theory goes back to Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card. It describes people on the web much like animals looking for food: they weigh how much useful information a path promises and how much effort it costs. The cue they use to estimate the benefit is what the theory calls information scent. This is mainly the text of a link or a heading and how much it sounds like the user’s goal.

Fu and Pirolli (2007) developed a computational model from the theory that predicts which link a user will follow and when they will leave a website. They tested the first version on detailed recordings of 8 participants and the second on data from 74 users solving realistic search tasks. The model reproduced the behavior better than a comparison model that only looked at the position of a link. One finding is particularly important for FAQ pages: users check links one after another and do not choose the best one but the first one that sounds good enough. If they find nothing that sounds good enough, they leave the page. A small experiment by Warcup and Zimmerman (2009) with 24 participants points in the same direction: on websites with links that sounded strongly like the search goal, participants completed their tasks faster and more accurately. They did not, however, like these sites clearly better.

Two things follow for an FAQ page. First, every question has to be worded the way the customer thinks it, otherwise it has no scent. Second, the order matters: the most frequent questions belong at the top, because visitors check from top to bottom and decide early.

Two views: a separate FAQ page or questions on every service page?

The first view says that questions belong where they arise, meaning on the respective service page. A separate FAQ page is a catch-all that hardly anyone opens. The second view says that many questions concern the whole business, such as process, payment, region or warranty, and need a common place. Both are right. I therefore consider a split to be sensible: questions about a service sit on its page, questions about the business and the collaboration on the FAQ page. The FAQ page links to the service pages, not the other way round as a substitute.

Where do the real questions come from?

The questions are not in the marketing plan but in the everyday life of the business. Collect them for two weeks from several sources and write them down word for word, in the customer’s words. How to use the same sources for articles is described in the article Editorial plan for articles.

How to find the search queries in Search Console is described in the article Understanding Google Search Console. After two weeks you usually have 40 to 80 questions, many of them duplicates. Merge identical questions and count how often each one came up. The following worked example shows a typical distribution.

How do you write a good answer?

An answer on the FAQ page has one job: to answer the question so that the visitor can move on. It is neither advertising copy nor a technical essay. A fixed structure has proven itself, which I call the three-sentence answer.

1. The first sentence answers

   Yes, no, a number, a range or a clear condition. Anyone asking about the price gets a price range or the factors it depends on, and not a sentence about quality.

2. The second sentence explains or qualifies

   What does the answer depend on, and when does it not apply? This honesty makes the answer credible.

3. The third sentence leads on

   A link to the service page, the detailed explanation or the next step, such as a conversation.

Keep most answers to two to four sentences. If an answer needs more than one paragraph, that is a sign the question deserves a page of its own. The FAQ page then shows the short answer with a link to the detailed page.

Organizing the page: topics, order, jump links

According to the information foraging model, the visitor decides early whether to stay on the page. The structure must therefore show them immediately where their question is.

• Group by topic. Five to eight topics with a clear heading, such as price, process, requirements, warranty. The headings are a scent in themselves.
• Most frequent topics first. The count from the collection determines the order, not the org chart.
• Jump links at the top. A short list of topics at the beginning of the page that jumps to each section.
• Questions as headings. Every question is a subheading in the text, not just an image or a button. That way visitors, search engines and assistive technologies such as screen readers can pick it up.
• Expand with care. Expandable answers save space. The text must still be in the page source and not loaded later.
• A path to a conversation at the end. Anyone who did not find their question sees how to ask it.

An FAQ page on which visitors find their question takes load off the phone and the inbox. Which questions are suitable for a chatbot and which need a conversation is described in the article Chatbot, callback or live chat.

The FAQ page and search engines: what it achieves and what it no longer does

For a long time, the FAQ page was considered an easy way to more space in search results. With machine-readable markup, structured data of the FAQPage type, Google showed the questions as expandable items directly below the result. In August 2023, Google changed this: since then, such FAQ results have only been shown for well-known, authoritative government and health websites (Google Search Central 2023). For an ordinary business, this advantage has largely disappeared. Check the current status in Google’s documentation before you put effort into the markup.

The page itself does not lose value as a result. It answers questions people search for, in the searchers’ words. This matches the question-page principle from the article SEO for SMEs: one question, one page, the best answer. A rule for drawing the line follows from it. Questions with high search demand and a long answer get a page of their own. The FAQ page answers them briefly and links. That way, the FAQ page and the service page do not compete for the same search query, a mistake the article Understanding search intent describes as cannibalization.

For visibility in AI answers, a clear FAQ page can help, because question and answer sit unambiguously together. The article Visible in AI answers lists structured data for the company, services and FAQ as machine-readable information. Google stated in 2023 that existing FAQ markup does not have to be removed. How much weight AI systems give to FAQ pages is not documented.

The lesson beyond the case

A good FAQ page is a by-product of good listening. Anyone who collects their customers’ questions learns not only what belongs on the website but also where quotes are unclear, where service pages are silent and which doubts delay the deal. The FAQ page makes this work visible. It shows a visitor that the business knows their questions before they ask them. How questions are built into service pages and the homepage is described in the article B2B website copy.

The limits are clear. The model by Fu and Pirolli was developed on general search tasks and small samples, not on businesses’ FAQ pages. How many inquiries a better FAQ page brings cannot be derived from it. And search engines’ rules change, as the 2023 change shows. Only the benefit to the visitor is constant.

Conclusion and what you can do this week

We began by asking
an FAQ page can answer customers’ real questions, save visitors time and be found. The answer: by taking the questions from the business’s everyday life word for word, having the answers answer in the first sentence, putting the most frequent topics at the top and giving long answers a page of their own. Information foraging theory explains why this works: visitors follow the scent of words that sound like their question and leave when they do not find it.

• Set up a shared document for customer questions: wording, source, date.
• Collect questions from conversations, emails, quotes and lost deals for two weeks.
• Look for search queries in question form in Search Console.
• Merge identical questions, count them and sort them by topic.
• Write every answer in three sentences: answer, qualify, lead on.
• Plan questions with long answers and high search demand as separate pages.
• Check all statements on the FAQ page twice a year.

Every question the FAQ page answers no longer has to be asked in the first conversation. That leaves time there for the questions that really matter.