Part 3 of a 4 part series….
When I work with clients I start out with a fact sheet that they fill in or I walk them through it and fill it out myself. I find that simply asking what would you like on your website is overwhelming and it can create a writer's block paralysis staring at a blank sheet. By the same token if you have an existing website the thought of revamping the site can be extremely daunting, so let's break it down into sections because those are manageable chunks. Remember you don't necessarily have to revamp your site with a big bang, you can make incremental changes and they all add up.
I have covered 'About Us' and 'Services' in the previous weeks and will be covering “Contact Us” next week as the final part of this series as I break the website sections into manageable chunks.
This week my little mini-series is focusing on the “FAQ” section and I will start with the basics; what is a FAQ page?
"An FAQ page is a webpage dedicated to listing and succinctly answering frequently asked questions from website visitors.
Using your FAQ page as an educational tool is an excellent way to help your visitors become better informed about your brand and the problems you solve.”
To put it simply a FAQ:
Susan Green is a copywriter and she writes that one reason to have a FAQ is “...because visitors have come to expect one.” But that is not the only reason to have a FAQ, a post on September 14, 2018, from Search Engine Journal also talks about “The Resurgence of FAQs”
"FAQ pages have begun to reappear into the priority website checks and improvement areas for SEO experts and marketing professionals alike.
In no small part, this has been driven by the growth in voice search, mobile search, and personal/home assistant and speakers.
These predominantly rely on the pre-results (Google Answers and Featured Snippets) and can be targeted specifically with FAQ pages."
The FAQ is a great place to repeat information that you have already covered because you can present it differently. The template for this page is going to be different than your other pages which will be written in a documentation form, the FAQ is shorter sound bites. For example, you will include your contact information possibly in several places but you can include it yet again if your potential new customer has a question that is not covered already. If they do contact you with a new question make note of it and consider if it is broad enough that others may have a similar question and you can add it to your FAQ to keep it fresh.
In your services section, you included information about what qualifies you to provide the service, the value you offer, and how you solve the client’s problem. You can restate these ideas in smaller chunks based on questions to highlight your selling points.
Ok, we have defined what a FAQ is and hit on some reasons to have one. Now we have to figure out what to put there. HostGator’s blog sums it up in three steps that make sense as you read it but if you are like me it doesn’t help when you put fingers to keyboard.
"First, answer any recurring questions from your customers about your specific business.
Next, go ahead and answer the questions you may have answered elsewhere on your site but which visitors may have overlooked.
Finally, and here’s where you can move beyond the basics, look at the types of searches that lead customers to your site."
Let’s break this down by giving you some examples, remember they may not apply directly to your business but even if they don’t turn the question around a bit so it applies to what you do.
*** As you saw in my post there is a discrepancy in the articles (a and an) used before FAQ and this drove me nuts to be honest because I felt that ‘an FAQ’ was grammatically incorrect but I couldn’t just go and change a direct quote to what I felt was correct. So I went to the internet of course, which can be dangerous but I found the answer that satisfies me, either can be correct it just depends on how you pronounce it. If you use it as a word (fack), which is how I pronounce it then ‘a’ is the choice for you. However, if you pronounce the letters one by one then ‘an’ if the choice for you because the pronunciation starts with a vowel sound. Source: IT Knowledege Exchange.Techtarget.Com.
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