Adding FAQs To Your Web Pages Is An Easy Way To Help Your SEO Efforts – 125

Transcript For Adding FAQs to Your Web Pages is an Easy Way to Help Your SEO Efforts- 125;

Caleb Baumgartner: Welcome to local SEO Tactics, where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I am producer Caleb Baumgartner, and in this episode, Bob, Jesse and Sue tackle a listener question about using your website’s frequently asked questions page not only to create quality content for visitors, but for improving your websites SEO. If you have questions about what sort of content to include in this section and how to word it, this episode will provide great insights to improve your web presence. Got a question for the team? Visit us at localseotactics.com/questions. Thanks for checking us out and enjoy the show.

Jesse Dolan: Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics, where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I’m your host, Jesse Dolan here with Bob Brennan, Sue Ginsburg here to answer questions from the realm of SEO. Sue, we’ve seen this background before we’re out of Austin, Texas. Today. What’s going on down south?

Sue Ginsburg: COVID is rampant in Austin, Texas these days, and the governor has it. Other than that, we are here in Austin today because we have a beloved client in Austin who asked this question, as many other clients have. And today’s question is, how do you choose the best questions to include in your frequently asked questions or your FAQs for SEO purposes? There are a lot of other considerations when you’re coming up with your frequently asked questions and they were very intentional and asked, how do you come up for SEO purposes? So hats off to Agis for asking this and to all the other clients who have either asked it or wondered it. The quote for today is, “A smart person will give smart answers, but a wise person will ask smart questions.”

Isn’t that great? This was anonymous. I could not find who said this. So Jesse, with your permission, if anybody knows who said this, can we give them a free t-shirt if they let us know?

Jesse Dolan: Oh yeah, absolutely. Email us, call it in, whatever. That’d be cool. That’s a great quote. So yeah.

Sue Ginsburg: Isn’t it great? Yeah. So I will share, I think that we all learn at some point that when we’re in a group setting learning something new and we have a question, chances are good that someone else in the same room has the same question, right?

Jesse Dolan: Yep.

Sue Ginsburg: Have you ever asked a question and somebody else said, thanks for asking that it was on my mind, whatever, whatever? Story I’ll share. So I was a statistics major back in the day, and in the upper level classes where there were more letters on the board than numbers, I was frequently lost and I had a lot of questions trying to figure out what was going on here. I was often intimidated thinking, oh my God, I must be dumber than the rest and whatever. And being lost most of the time, most class times I had questions. When I would muster up my courage to ask the question, always 100% of the time someone would come up to me after class and say, thanks for asking that question. I had the same question. I didn’t want to ask it, whatever, whatever.

So now, if somebody ever asks a question that I had, I always make a point of going up to them and saying, thank you for asking that question. I had the same question. I don’t know if anybody else can relate to this. I think the point being, there is no such thing as a dumb question. And you’re probably just the brave one asking it and everybody else wants to, or many other people want to know.

Jesse Dolan: And why does it always take so much courage? In all seriousness, right? You both know I was just at a Mastermind the other weekend and we led with this topic of ask questions. This is what we’re here to learn. It’s such a thing that we’re all afraid to ask questions. Right? And we literally address it on the front side. Isn’t that just crazy? That’s how you learn, but we’re always so bashful to ask.

Bob Brennan: Yeah. I think it’s about being vulnerable, right?

Sue Ginsburg: Well, I was going to say, because I think as humans we all want everybody to think we’re smart. Now, I think if you ask a question, you must be smart. Other people might think if I ask a question, it’s going to show I’m vulnerable and don’t know everything, or something.

Bob Brennan: Right.

Sue Ginsburg: Wow.

Bob Brennan: Good point.

Sue Ginsburg: So anyway, moving on. I believe that all business owners want to have good content, want to have helpful content, want to engage their visitors, customers, prospects, including frequently asked questions on their website. This is what you want your website to communicate. And maybe even it answers questions and you have less questions emailed to you or called to you and you have a lot more informed customers. So I think they bring up a really good question. How do you know which questions to include? Are they the questions that your past customers have? Are they the questions that you once had? How do you know? And again, back to our great client in Austin, they did a really, really nice job of creating pages of questions and very thoughtful answers for their website. And then they realized, wow, each of these questions we can use as a blog post, because each question is a subject unto itself.

They’ve been in business many, many years, have probably fielded hundreds of questions and just went back to some of those questions and jotted down the answers and put them up on the website as their frequently asked questions thinking if somebody had these questions and were asking us, then I trust that other people like them are going to have those questions too. And I think that even people who think they know the answer to questions, and I’ll speak from my own experience, you may learn something new when somebody else asks it and you see what the answer is. So, I love this question. I think it’s really good. I’m a big fan of frequently asked questions on websites. And I would just ask our listeners, the business owners out there, how much have you thought about your frequently asked questions and the answers, what’s up there, what’s the impact of them and how have you determined which questions you put up there? Also adding in there, have you thought about it from an SEO standpoint? Is that a factor when you’re considering these? Or is it a factor when you’re answering these, or both?

So let’s ask Jesse and Bob, the SEO experts. What do you think? And where does SEO come into deciding which frequently asked questions are put on the website, and also the answers to those questions?

Jesse Dolan: Thanks, Sue. I’ll talk from the SEO perspective. And I know Bob will chime in, as we were discussing right before we hit record here, on more of the client conversion side, right? This is definitely a double-edged question. Having FAQ’s, questions and answers, however you want to frame it up on your site is great for multiple reasons. From the SEO side, as you’re mentioning, creating content for your website, it’s something that can be a little burdensome, labor intensive, and sometimes a little bit of a mind bender for clients or business managers, owners, whatever it is, whoever’s doing your website. Creating content is a challenge. In some cases, to rank a page, or to better optimize a page, you need more content, right? We find that a lot when we take over a new client and work on their website. They might have some good information, it’s just not extensive enough, right? And to sit down and like well, how can I talk more about my product or my service or my company or the client position, whatever?

A great way to just add content to pages is questions and answers, FAQs. I liked your quote earlier. I mean, asking a question allows a conversation to start to happen, right? And that’s not exactly what your quote was, but that’s the spirit of the wise person. Ask a question and then things will follow. And if you can just sit down and try to answer some questions, if you’re trying to write content for your website, answering some questions can be a lot easier than trying to define some position or statement or benefits. So right there, it’s easy to create content in that question and answer format. You can add that to any given page. And then, like you’re saying, it’s also great to take all that. Let’s just say if you have, I don’t know, five or 10 or 15 product or service pages, add a couple or few FAQ’s to each page and then take all those FAQ’s, mash them together and have one giant master FAQ page with all of them, just as a resource.

And then you can run with those FAQs and create blog posts and expand on it. It’s just a great brainstorming concept for content. Now, working specifically SEO into it, just like everything else for writing content on our site, we want to be intentional about the keywords that we’re using. So if you have a particular question that you’re trying to answer, can you work your whatever page it is you’re talking about, if it’s this service, auto repair, make sure the question has word auto repair in it. That the answer says auto repair or things related to auto repair. And usually what’s pretty easy to do if you’re not this great SEO mind and you just don’t write content naturally with SEO mixed into it… which there are some great jokes on Facebook, like one of my favorite memes going around is, so am SEO walks into a bar, restaurant, nightclub, a cafe, whatever, like just comma, comma, comma, comma, with all these different keywords. But that’s like if you’re an SEO, quote, unquote-

Bob Brennan: In Austin, Texas.

Jesse Dolan: Right. If you’re an SEO, you just naturally start to write content with keywords because you get familiar with it. But if you’re listening to this and you’re not an SEO expert and you just need to write content, write your content, write these FAQ’s, write your questions, write your answer, then take a second stage and go, okay, what is this about? What’s my main keywords? And then just go replace some words, right? Mix in the keywords, mix in the variations for those keywords in that. And yeah, that’s a great way to create content. If you’re not sure what questions are there, which is another part of it. If you don’t know where to start on that, we’ve talked about it before and we’ll put it in the show notes. There’s a great resource called answerthepublic.com where it’s just a database of questions that people ask online.

It’s like a keyword tool, but it’s for questions. And that helps you out. You can just type in your topic and explore that. Also what you can do is type in some of your product or service keywords into Google. And usually, I shouldn’t say that, sometimes you’ll see some FAQ’s pop up in there. Maybe try some different markets if you’re in Minneapolis, whatever, do some searches for Chicago and St. Louis and just other markets. If you’re not finding anything on some immediate searches, sometimes what Google will do is, let’s just say if you search for auto repair Minneapolis and then click, let’s say on a result and then click back to Google or maybe even redo the search again, Google will then, somewhere mid page, pop open a box that has people also ask. It’s not the people also search for, which is at the bottom of every search result page. By redoing a search, you can trigger sometimes, depending on the term, Google will have a little box with two or three or five lines of questions.

And those can be great questions for you to have a jump off point. Right? So, and same thing there, get inspired by that question. Don’t copy it exactly. Give your own original answer and then come back later and work in your keywords. A great way to add SEO content to your site, paid to your pages and in a pretty simple way that doesn’t require a lot of creative writing skills, right? If you’re knowledgeable about your product, your service, your company, this should be something that you can type out pretty easy compared. So yeah, I think it’s a great question, Sue and there’s a lot of SEO benefits there. Bob, throw it over to you if you want to talk about generally why answering questions is so important. Sue kind of alluded too.

Bob Brennan: Yeah. I mean, when I work with businesses or people within our own business, I tell them that it really just comes down to time and money. And that consumer wants to know basically two things, know how much is it going to cost and how long is it going to take? And then along with that, you work with your team and listen to calls, if you are recording your calls. Your clients will tell you what they want. They’ll tell you what they’re asking questions for. And if you can publish that somehow on your landing page or your money page, where people are landing, and that’s a huge conversion feature when you can do it.

It’s interesting because I’ll work with auto repair clients and listen to their calls and their team is like, well, can’t give you a price over the phone, you’re just going to have to bring it in and we’re going to have to take a look at it. Like really? I got nothing better to do to drive over and without any kind of idea what you’re going to charge me. You know what I mean? And that’s where you, you don’t necessarily need to give away the store in terms of information, but you do need to give them a reason to at least call you or stop by or give them the bookends and just say, Hey, most jobs are between this and this, call us for more details or stop by and we’ll give you a firm estimate or whatever the case is. So I don’t know if that makes sense. You really need to lean on your people. Ask them what clients are asking or listen to your recordings to figure that out.

Now, the other side of that is if your competition isn’t giving that information away and they are that auto repair place that says, Hey, come in, you can hang out in our waiting room for three hours until we figure out what it is, then there’s your opportunity, right? Where you can, again, you don’t need to be the cheapest, but you just need to have definitions. And in some ways it might give you a better client that’s willing to pay more because you’re willing to get them taken care of in this period of time. Because it’s time and money. And for some people, money is more important because they have all the time in the world. And for others, they don’t have a lot of time and they’re willing to pay 50x percent more or whatever the case is. So that’s my spin on it from a conversion perspective.
Jesse Dolan: I think there’s an element too of, like what Sue was mentioning earlier of, answering questions can reduce some of the burden on your labor, too.

Bob Brennan: Right, right.

Jesse Dolan: We’ve seen that a lot with some of the scripting you’ve done with people for the call handling and call management. In this case, it’s not quite the same question and answer type on your webpage, but if you hear these questions over and over, these can be statements you make. Hey, you don’t have to wait, we’ll quote you right now, just ask us what you’re looking for. Just like, whatever it is, make those declarative deals. Because again, so like you say on the front side, people are so afraid to ask questions. But when you can look at… I don’t know about you guys, like you go shopping on Amazon, you got your products, you got the reviews, but then there’s the questions. And I will look at the those a lot.

Bob Brennan: Yeah.

Jesse Dolan: Just what kind of questions are people having about this? Are things breaking? Are they having a hard time installing this thing or whatever? It’s just a great resource area. And I think it really, to your point Bob, makes you seem more knowledgeable, more premium, the more information that you have.

Bob Brennan: Yeah.

Jesse Dolan: You can take some burden off your team. Yeah, it can help you for SEO, but then also for this conversion point, you just seem like, well literally, you seem like you have all the answers, right?

Bob Brennan: Well, and I’ll just say too, real quick, is, and we’ve seen this just where for a lot of our clients, the key metric we watch is phone calls, right? And within our own businesses, we’ll make some of those changes, answer some of those questions, publish some of those prices and put some of those constraints out there and our phone calls go down, right? And we’re like, geez, now what? What are we doing? Type of a thing. And we’ll find out days later from our team, they’re like, these are the best numbers, business volume we’ve ever done. Just to find out it’s like, people are not calling to confirm things, people are seeing the price, seeing the time constraints and I’m there. And they get in their car and they go, so to speak.

And then that, like you said, it brings the call volume down but then the actual revenue goes up, and the foot traffic goes up because they got their questions answered. They got what they needed and they’re on their way, so to speak. And that those are, for small businesses and those of us that are not NBAs or anything, those are different metrics and interesting results in terms of affecting your website.

Jesse Dolan: Yep.

Sue Ginsburg: I’ll also add from my own consumer perspective, if I’m on a website looking at something, or on Amazon, and the questions are just so off base, they’re not real questions about the product or service. They’re-

Bob Brennan: Planted.

Sue Ginsburg: Well, exactly. And it’s very frustrating to me and it definitely affects how I think about that business. It’s like, come on, give me the questions that I really want to know the answer to, not these planted ones that make you look good.

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: Nope. It’s all about… I mean, we say the same thing kind of like reviews, running a good business there’s certain things as smart, educated consumers nowadays, right? The more the digital evolution and all of this happened, the more we’re getting smarter. If you’re running a good business, you’re going to get a lot of reviews, right? Just because people are happy to leave you reviews. If you’re running a good business, you’re listening to your clients, right? Whether it be the phone calls, like you’re saying Bob, or even in person interactions and just turning that inside out to present it back to everybody else. That just really shows you’re a good business.

It’s one of those intangible things. I don’t know if intangible is the right way to put it, but yeah, it makes a big difference. So not just from conversion. Again, like Local SEO Tactics, of course what we’re here for, talked on the front side why this is great. FAQ questions are great for content on your site to attract people, to get traffic. Once they’re there reading this stuff, you’re going to get the business. Right? It’s a great double dip.

Sue Ginsburg: So Jesse, question for you, well you both mentioned having questions at the bottom of different pages. Is there a better way to do frequently asked questions on each page versus let’s just have a whole section of FAQs?

Jesse Dolan: Yeah. Great question, Sue. Yeah. Our standard processes is to put them somewhere middle to bottom half of page. Just because usually the things we’re looking for at the top of the page are more call to action, are more direct information or things like that. And we’re using the FAQ and the Q and A’s to add more content to the page, right? Which first things first, when somebody lands on your page within a few seconds, they need to know they’re in the right spot. They need to be already making their decision. And then they’re going to scroll and read more. FAQ’s and Q and A’s are very text intensive, right? So you really have to read it. You have to want to read it. So putting it further down the page, that’s getting it in front of those prospects that are actually engaging in reading. And now this is even more information, right? From that user engagement part.

From an SEO standpoint, the content is on your page. So the Google bot’s reading it and you’re getting the credit for all that. But second part for your question is, that’s how we place it on the page, but we do put it on each individual page. Yes, have a main FAQ’s page that you compile it all too, but you get those SEO benefits by having it on the individual pages, because now you’re adding more content to that page, more text to that page, more chances for your keywords and related information for that page. And it’s a great benefit to have it on those pages. You don’t need it on every page of your website, to be clear. But like Bob was saying, your money pages, your landing pages, your primary product or service pages, pages you’re trying to rank, pages you need more content, more keyword density on. That’s a great way to add to it.

Sue Ginsburg: That’s great. Love that. Anything else from you, Bob?

Bob Brennan: No. No, I think Jesse did a good job covering it. And I think it’s just listening to your customer as much as possible. If you’re annoyed with your customer, that’s a good sign that you’re not hearing them. And that’s a question that you need to put. You’re like, I got to answer this again. No, that’s a question you got to put on your site.

Jesse Dolan: Make your job easier, right? Yeah, put it out there.

Bob Brennan: If it’s directions, you know what I mean? Questions you’re tired of answering. Guess what? That needs to be on your site.

Jesse Dolan: Yep.

Sue Ginsburg: Wow. Well, on that note, we have a different client in Austin who, when they did road construction on the highway and changed their exit, somehow or other their GMB had incorrect directions. So they were constantly getting people calling saying, Hey, I’m at this lumber store, this lumber yard, whatever, and this is where Google led me, where are you? And then when we started working with them, thankfully we were able to get that corrected. And she said, heard the number of phone calls that she was getting from everybody going there, significantly dropped because now Google was directing them to the right place.

Jesse Dolan: Right. Which in that case, again goes back to that necessarily wasn’t an FAQ on the website, but that’s born out of listening to the client, right? Like finding out where you’re annoyed, like you’re saying Bob and addressing it.

Bob Brennan: Yeah, I mean, not to go too far off on a tangent, but if you ever have a client that you’ve given directions to over the phone and they call back said I’m still lost or whatever the case is. And if your team is doing that, you’re absolutely okay. You can view that as an annoyance or you can view it as an opportunity in that, if you’re a service business and people are coming to you, whatever it is, dry cleaning, auto repair or whatever the deal is, and you’re getting these kinds of calls and they’re tying up your team with those type of calls, great opportunity to send them a text with a link to your store. And Jesse, you brought this up, like actually a Google link, like through Google maps would be ideal because then that gets you a little more SEO, doesn’t it? A little more juice, so to speak.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah. That’s something we’ll dive into a little more in depth on a future episode, but basically driving directions is what you’re talking about.

Bob Brennan: Right, right.

Jesse Dolan: A little bonus nugget here, essentially if, Sue, if you’re going to go visit Bob at his auto repair shop, if you pulled up Google on your phone and typed in the address or the business name and did directions, and then use that to navigate to Bob’s location, Google is aware of that, right? I’m not talking about Apple Maps navigation. We’re explicitly in this scenario for what Bob is saying, we’re talking about Google Maps and Google driving directions. Google is aware that you were in this place uptown or suburb or Metro, and you’re driving to this business, right? That’s a real signal from the real world about the relevancy of the authority and trustworthiness, to an extent, of Bob’s business.

And so wherever possible, to Bob’s point, is that people are driving to your location. And if you’re relaying directions to them or providing them directions, if you can send them a text that triggers the navigation to pop up through Google, Google Maps, and can show Google that I’ve got people coming from the Northwest, from the Southeast, from downtown, uptown, like everybody’s coming from these quadrants to my business. That’s how you start to impact the proximity on your Google my business location, and start to be shown further away because Google is like, wow, everybody’s coming from seven corners of the world to visit these folks. So yeah, that’s kind of a little bit of a trick and a hack that we’re going to dive into in future episodes. Like Bob’s saying, the easiest way is to just put this in the hands of the people that are already driving to your location and just roll out the red carpet for them to utilize the tool in that way.

I guess, as a little bit of a teaser, if anybody likes that, that is a technology we can deploy. We can make it easy for you to send this information to your clients with a text message, build it right into a form on your website without, like you said Bob, without going too much on a tangent, if anybody’s interested, just go to Intrycks.com. Reach out to us, send Sue an email, use a contact form, whatever it is, we’ll get the discussion going. It can be a great tool to not only get those clients to your door, which is a thing, but also to send these signals to Google at the same time and to help the ranking of your GMB, and just pump that fly wheel. So, yeah. Good little side topic there, for sure.

Sue Ginsburg: Great. That’s brilliant and helpful. Truly genuinely helpful to the visitor too.

Jesse Dolan: Sure.

Bob Brennan: Yeah. If they’re not frustrated, if they’re happy, that’s what you want and you want them coming through the door happy, not frustrated. Okay. We’re not good at directions or we’re not good at driving or whatever it might be, but they’re frustrated. And they’re going to take that frustration out on you, one way or the other. Like they say, you got to fix the customer first and then fix their problems.

Jesse Dolan: Yep. Absolutely.

Sue Ginsburg: I like that. I like that. Okay. If you remember one thing and one thing only, your frequently asked questions are bigger than just Q and A. They’re part of your website’s user-friendliness and part of how you add value to your website visitors. Can they help SEO? Yes. Be intentional and thoughtful about the questions you ask and also about the answers. It’s all part of what makes your webpage show up, show up high in searches and a genuine way of engaging with your website visitors, which of course is what we all want. Again, the quote of the day, “A smart person will give smart answers, but a wise person will last smart questions.” And if you can send us the author of that quote, then you get to wear one of these high test Intrycks T-shirts.

Jesse Dolan: Right here, if you’re on video. That’s a great reason to switch over to YouTube. Check it out. Holding it up. No, that’s a great question, Sue. And I keep chuckling because the transcript on this one, our keyword density for questions for this transcript on this, on the show show page is going to be off the charts. A question about questions, that’s sure to trigger some keywords there. So if that question helped you out, we’d love to hear if something else that’s on your mind, like Sue said on the front side of this episode, don’t be bashful.

If you’re thinking about it, and we haven’t answered it yet, we’d like to answer it for you directly. But then also there’s other people, quote, in the room that would love to get the answers as well. Go out to LocalSEOTactics.com, scroll down to the bottom, click on the link for questions, type it in, call it in, either way we’d love to hear from you and to help you out, and like I said, help everybody else out too. Thanks for the question, Sue and teeing it up. Bob, thanks for all the helpful insights as always from that perspective. And yeah, hopefully if you folks are listening out there, you can take this and run with it. It’s an easy way to add content and add some good stuff to your website. Until next time, talk to you later.

Bob Brennan: See you.

Sue Ginsburg: See you.