FAQ Pages

In the early days of the internet, FAQ (frequently asked question) pages were common. One of the things your website can do for you is to provide quick answers to questions people often ask. How better to do that than with a section of frequently asked questions?

Actually, there are now many better ways to do that. The main reason is that online search works much better now than it used to. Because of that, visitors are less likely to go to a website’s home page and click on the FAQ page in order to find information like which insurance programs the practice accepts, or whether they make appointments for kids as well as adults.

Instead, someone looking for that information is more likely just to ask Google what insurance you take or whether you work with kids. That’s faster and more efficient than scrolling through the FAQ page — not to mention checking to see if you have one.

So we don’t usually include FAQ pages in new websites. But what do you do with the information from your old FAQ page, if you have one? You don’t want to waste the research time and you also don’t want to remove useful information.

Is your old FAQ page worth keeping?

The first thing to do is to make sure your FAQ page is really your own original content. In the heyday of FAQ pages, it was very common for people to grab the FAQ list from a competitor’s website. I’m not sure why, but I can tell you with confidence that fewer than half the FAQ pages we run into are actually original content.

Also, any FAQ page is probably quite old, so you should make sure that the information is still up to date.

Repurposing your FAQs

Once you’re sure that you want to keep the information, determine where it should go. Here are some likely places:

• Your blog is probably the top place. If the questions you have listed are actually asked frequently, you should have a strong blog post answering each one of those questions. Copy each question and paste it into a new post as a title. Copy the answers and paste them in as the body of the post. Then edit them to create strong, search engine optimized answers to the title questions.
• Your About Us page is the right place for information about your company or organization, whether it’s frequently asked or not. You may find that you’ve already covered a lot of the information there already; if not, add it in.
• Information about shipping, insurance, eligibility for services and so forth should have its own individual page. Think about where it best belongs in your site architecture, and consider putting it into a footer menu. People are willing to look around for that kind of information.

If your website is old enough that it has an FAQ page, it might be time for an update. Contact us to get started.