Website Essentials: Your FAQ for Your Industry

A great Internet marketing website builds trust with your audience, educates them, shows them you’re the best choice for their needs and a whole host of other goals. In addition to interacting directly with your audience, you also need to provide enough information to get your site ranked well for your keyword and topics.

Having a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page on your website accomplishes both of these goals. With a FAQ page, you can brand yourself as an expert AND you can create valuable content for search engines.

FAQs exist for every industry. Whether you’re running a website on purchasing vintage comic books or you’re working on an authority site for credit repair, there are frequently asked questions that your audience will undoubtedly have.

When you answer these questions for them, they get to see that you’re not just in it for the money (even if you actually are!). It shows your expertise on the topic (even if you borrowed the expertise from someone else!). It also makes it easy to buy from you. When people get help from someone they are more likely to return the favor by making a purchase, subscribing to your blog or signing up for your newsletter.

So how do you start a FAQ? Here are five simple steps to follow.

Look to emails from previous customers.

If your website has been in business for a while, you’ve probably received emails from customers at some point. Make sure to review these emails and look for any questions they may have had. Add these questions to the list of questions that you’ll answer on your FAQ page.

Play detective.

Look at your topic and consider what questions you had when you first started building your site. Think about your site and your topic from your website visitor’s point of view. What major questions pop up for you? Be sure to address these.

Look at question sites.

Yahoo Answers, Quora and other question and answer sites can be terrific resources for building your FAQ pages. These sites were built on questions so you can just scan through them and figure out which questions are most important to feature on your site.

Look to your competitors.

Some of your competitors will be on the ball and will have their own FAQ list on their website. Look through their FAQs and select questions that are a good match for your site to add to your list.

Create unique answers to all of these questions.

Even though you may be looking at other sources and websites in order to figure out which questions to answer, this doesn’t mean you can rip off their answers. You need to create unique content that can be used on your website. In many cases, your answers will be giving the same information that is present on other websites – but you need to make it unique in order to avoid duplicate content penalties.