Did you know that you can use FAQs as a simple SEO strategy for your business?
You can and it’s relatively simple to do!
Step 1: Brainstorm a List of Questions that Your Customers or Clients Ask
Reflect for a moment on your last 5 or so clients and think about what questions they had. What things come up most often when you first started talking? Jot down every question you can think of – important or not.
If you are stuck on this, look through your sent emails and see what kinds of questions you are answering there. If your business is on social media, look at any comments or direct messages that you have had with prospective customers and see what might be a common inquiry.
Are you still stuck or don’t have enough business yet to collect enough questions?
That’s perfectly ok!
Browse to Answer The Public to find a powerful tool that will give you LOTS of ideas of what questions people are searching for in your industry or business niche. There is a paid version of this tool, but you can gain tons of insight with the one free search allowed per day. And if you need or want to do a second search right away, just register your email to create a free account and you will get 3 searches per day.
Even if you weren’t stuck for ideas, we still recommend checking out this tool as it will give you a ton of ideas and insight into great keywords for your business.
Step 2: Pick Your Best 5 – 10 Questions
Once you have brainstormed using any or all of the above suggestions, take the list and pick out the ones that you feel are most relevant to your business. We recommend choosing a combination of the most frequently asked customer questions together with some of the most searched questions (from the Answer the Public research you did).
Quick tip: When viewing Answer the Public results, the darker the dots in the middle of the keyword circles indicate the more common questions.
If your list only has 5-7 questions, then you can skip this step.
Step 3: Write Out Your Responses to Each Question
Write out relatively short answers to each of your selected top questions. They should be only a few paragraphs maximum, but you can reference other resources to direct people to more information if necessary.
This is also an opportunity to use some of those keywords that people were frequently searching for, but don’t overdo it. Answer the questions as directly and succinctly as possible. This is where your knowledge and expertise can shine through and build confidence with your visitors as well as adding valuable keyword content to your website. You are much better off using natural language and speaking in your own voice to your audience, than trying to awkwardly include more keywords.
Step 4: Add Your FAQs to Your Website and Google Business Profile
Now that you have your list of FAQs all ready to go, you are ready to get them added to your website AND to your Google Business Profile!
If possible we recommend creating a top level FAQ page for your site that is part of your navigation menu. Your web designer can help you out with this step if needed.
To add the FAQs to your Google Business Profile, navigate to your listing in any browser window and click on ‘Messages’.
From there, you should see a ‘Set up FAQs’ near the bottom right side, just above where you would type a message. Click on it to add your FAQs to your Google Business Profile!
What? You don’t have a Google Business Profile yet?
Here’s a guide to setting one up. It is free to use and a GREAT way to get more traction with Google!
Step 5: Review Your Content Regularly
Now that you have the framework in place, adding new FAQs or adjusting your responses is easy. Our businesses evolve over time and so likely so will the questions that people ask and/or our answers to them!
We recommend setting a task on your calendar or in your to-do list on at minimum an annual basis to do a quick review of the questions that you have in your list. Take a few moments to think if there are new questions that have come up since you last reviewed them and make sure that the answers you have there are still accurate. Remember to check on both your website AND your Google Business Profile if you added them in both places!
And that’s it!
Five steps to creating keyword-rich and effective FAQs which will help your website visitors in the short term (by answering their most pressing questions) and also help your SEO in the long term.
by PinPoint Local Grimsby