How Do FAQs work?

When collating a list of FAQs for your business website, the priority should be content relevancy which means that answering the queries of your customers about your business’s service and products should be your approach. Having FAQs that are sourced from local GMB Q&A, other local directories, chat bot queries, search listening tools with questions of local-flavored content and trends, should be your source to create custom FAQs that cover all aspects of your business and the needs of customers. Additionally, for content freshness ideas, you can make use of topic trending tools such as Keyword Planner, Answer the Public, Topicseed, etc. Reiterating, ensuing that you have FAQs that are locally flavored are integral if you wish to be found by potential customer easily. While there is no specified limitation on the number of words that should be in an FAQ, having an answer that is concise and directly answers the question should be the focus to suit the requirements of Google's BERT algorithm. That said, according to LARK, a short answer should be no more than 256 characters which is anywhere between 50-65 words. In addition, according to another study, to increase the chance of your FAQ being picked up as a voice answer, it should be concise and preferably be limited to 29 words.

Once you have collated the FAQs you wish to publish on your website – which answer questions about your business, and are conversational and locally flavored – you'd want the search engine to know what the content is all about and give it enough information for it to be picked as a relevant answer on search and here’s where you can use schema markup to optimize your FAQs. By not optimizing your FAQs you’re giving the search engine the option of choosing the closest relevant answer and not the most relevant answer which could be your content as FAQs. Use the following schemas with your FAQs to give the search engine a clear idea of the content, while optimizing your FAQs in the process:

FAQ schema

The FAQPage schema markup ensures that questions and answers that are authored by the business are picked up by search engines when a query is made online. The FAQ schema should be used to answer a single question, or questions related to a single topic. You can use this structured data markup when it is not a Q&A forum setting, where there can be alternate answers to a single question.

‘How to’ schema

Use the ‘How to’ schema markup to describe a step-by-step procedure. This schema markup should be used when ‘how to’ or a step-by-step procedure is the central focus.

Speakable Schema:

The Speakable schema indicates that a particular section of the web page is “Speakable”. This schema is utilized by voice assistants to “speak” the text using text-to-speech conversion.

Once you have collated, created, and optimized your FAQs, the next big step is publishing your FAQs on your business website and local directories. Choos the right FAQ publishing tool, one that allows you to create your FAQs and publish them to your website, directories, and voice assistants with ease. This is vital to ensure consistent brand answers across all platforms. It helps improve the trust of your brand with customers (existing and potential) and Google. This is an integral part of E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trust) and the Quality Rater's Guidelines. In fact, Forbes Magazine determined that by having a consistent brand presentation and image improves a business's revenue by 23%.