Using FAQs on your site to get extra traffic from search results
Google loves a good Q&A, and they’re great for your search engine optimisation.
This is an excellent technique that Google has been responding to very positively recently. It involves a fairly interesting type of structured data.
Structured data is a series of tags and what’s known as microdata that Google, Bing and Yahoo all use to work out what content on your site matches specific, common types of information like phone numbers. It primarily sits in your pages’ code – it’s not something the user sees directly. Although in the case of FAQs you do want them to be able to see them as well – that way your front-end information matches what’s happening behind the scenes. Google definitely wants to see that the information you’re supplying them is also what you’re giving to your users.
You may have noticed little ‘People also ask’ click-to-open sections like this on Google results pages before:
Those questions and answers are being pulled from web pages with ‘FAQ’ structured data on their homepages.
This technique involves adding an FAQ section to your own homepage, and then having the appropriate code added to those so Google can pick them up correctly.
I’ve tried this with a handful of clients and most have seen a 3-4 ranking place increase as a result! Even if Google doesn’t end up using your FAQs on their results page, the effect is the same; they just like to see the code in place.
So this is well worth implementing as part of your SEO strategy.
When writing FAQs for this purpose though it’s best to make them somewhat generic – they should be about your industry generally rather than about your specific offering. (If you take a look at the ones I wrote on my own homepage, you’ll see they’re predominantly about SEO and it’s advantages rather than being about the services I offer myself.)
If you’d like me to implement this for you please just get in touch – and of course I can do it all for you as part of an ongoing SEO campaign too.