If FAQs are not yet an integral part of your marketing and SEO strategy, they need to be. When we say this, we get a common reaction, “Really? Are they really that effective?”
NB: This is an article from Milestone
Yes, they are! FAQs actually have all characteristics of a good marketing solution. Most good business or marketing solutions have four characteristics:
- They are simple – sometimes unbelievably so
- Their timing is right
- They solve more than one problem or challenge
- They are scalable, resulting in positive ROI
Let’s walk through how FAQs align with each of the above marketing solutions characteristics.
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FAQ and How-To – Simple Solutions
Let’s start with a few stats first.
- 80% of all searches are informational – your audience is seeking information or answers.
- Most marketing content focuses on transactional queries, resulting in a content gap. It is no wonder that 90% of the content created by marketers has no audience.
- During their annual conference, Google I/O 2021 announced that about 17% of searches every day are unique in that they have never happened before. This is a direct result of the growth of mobile search voice search on screenless devices.
These three statistics are interconnected. There is a growing disconnect between what the majority of searchers look for and the content that marketers put out. With the explosion of long-tail searches and voice searches, information-seeking queries are growing, and marketers need to find a way to reach this audience.
Businesses often choose to omit this from their marketing effort because of the cost of sustaining and creating high-quality, informative content for blog posts and articles.
Adding FAQ and How-To type content to your existing marketing landing pages is a simple solution that solves multiple challenges:
- You can reach your audience when they are seeking information with content you already created for their transactional searches
- Leverage the power of FAQ and How-To schema markup to saturate SERPs when your content appears in Featured Snippets, People Also Ask, Enhanced FAQ listings, and more
- Execute with minimal design enhancements to (without having to redesign) your pages to align with evolving search algorithms like SMITH, BERT, LaMDA, and MUM
- Achieve more impact with your content team and budget – resulting in better ROI
The Timing is Right
Search algorithms are evolving to address searchers’ needs, not just on computers and mobile devices but also on screenless devices and voice assistants. This has resulted in a number of SERP enhancements that answer searchers’ questions.
Nearly 25% of SERPs are devoted to answering questions
Milestone research on 575 sites we manage across industries shows that nearly one-fourth of SERPs today are devoted to answering questions.
Most of these SERP features appear in the first fold – above the #1 listing. Answering questions by adding FAQs to your pages can help you appear more frequently in these listings.
Seen another way, if you are not answering questions, you are virtually taking yourself out of contention from a fourth of page 1 listings!
Leverage the SMITH algorithm
With the SMITH algorithm, Google can process entire pages. If the content that matches a query is not at the top of the page, Google now lands searchers at the part of the page that meets their query. This means that you can leverage your transactional landing pages to also meet the need for informational searches by adding FAQs to these pages.
FAQs are connected to other aspects of SEO
A solution that integrates multiple aspects of SEO has the best chance of driving positive ROI:
- When content is marked up with error-free advanced schema, your chances of appearing in SERP enhancements like Featured Snippets, People Also Ask, and Enhanced FAQ listings go up, helping you maximize SERP visibility.
- FAQs can also be leveraged to develop an internal linking strategy, creating topical hubs, and maximizing engagement by guiding visitors through your site.
- Adding FAQs to your existing pages is an effective way to deliver a more comprehensive experience to your audience with just a few design enhancements to create a placeholder for your FAQs. There is no need to create new pages and designs, saving precious resources.
Adding FAQs to your landing pages is great by itself, but you can take the strategy even further:
- You can also publish your FAQs on your Google My Business listings before local guides answer your audience’s questions. Control the messaging with your brand voice while also maximizing local visibility. Having the same answer on your site and local profiles ensures consistent messaging for your audience across touchpoints.
- Searches on voice assistants and screenless devices keep increasing with each passing month and year. By publishing your FAQs on voice assistants, you make your content future-ready.
10 Tips for getting voice ready with your FAQ strategy
- Build your site to incorporate mobile-first best practices
- If you haven’t already, make sure you provide safe browsing by going HTTPS
- Focus on page speed & experience
- Create local listings
- Make question research a part of your keyword research
- Research your competitors’ rich results
- Keep your content conversational
- Use structured data to markup your content with FAQ and How-To schema
- Leverage FAQs to strengthen your internal linking structure
- Also, publish your FAQs on Google my Business and Voice Assistants
