FAQ FR

The Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section is a part of your website where you address common concerns, questions, and objections that customers have.

It’s different from your About Us page where you tell the broader story behind your brand. The FAQ section, instead, deals with the details. It’s the go-to destination for finding answers to specific questions about your product or business operation.

An FAQ page can be a distraction or an asset, depending on how you execute it.

But to ensure that it’s the latter, here are some indications that it’s time to incorporate a FAQ page as part of your website:

• Customers email you with the same questions on an ongoing basis, so it’s better to address them publicly and prominently.
• You have or plan to create content/landing pages that you can link to and continue the journey from question to conversion.
• Your product/service/business raises questions and concerns that are best handled in a straightforward manner.

Your inbox and customer support tickets will likely be the first places to look. But you should also anticipate objections that you can turn into questions, especially if the answer will put your customer’s mind at ease.

Consider how to strategically raise the right questions to educate customers about your products and create demand.

When deciding how to choose the questions you’ll include in your FAQ section, focus on relevancy, utility, and opportunities to turn that question into a path to further engagement or conversion.

How you position your answers is key. Even if the question is about a potential shortcoming in your product or business, put on your PR hat and put a positive spin on your answer.

While you should demonstrate authority through the depth of your answers, be sure you’re not losing your audience by giving them more than they need.

Write your questions from your customer’s perspective (e.g. “How do I…”) and answer from your business’s perspective (e.g. “You should…” or “We provide…”).

Many sites treat a FAQ section as a standalone page that uses a question and answer format to communicate information. While this serves the most basic function of a FAQ page—to reduce the friction on the path to purchase—you can also build a FAQ section with dedicated pages for each answer to create a more search-friendly section of your website.

By hyperlinking each question to a separate page, you can help surface each answer through Google and your own site’s search. Even if your audience isn’t searching for topics related to your brand, they might be searching for answers to questions related to your industry via Google, which can help you get found if you create content or landing pages that are optimized for these specific search queries.

It depends. If customer service is a core part of your business, you might want to create a fully fleshed out support center or “help desk”, using HelpDesk or Zendesk, with a FAQ incorporated as part of your customer support flow (i.e. customers check the FAQ before they reach out to a customer service rep).

But if you’re selling products or services that are bound to generate a lot of questions, it might be enough to prominently display a link to a simple FAQ page in your website navigation to focus on reducing purchasing anxieties for visitors. WaterAid links to their FAQ page from the main menu, in their About section.

While there is no universal FAQ template to follow, there are questions which are common across industries. Here are some of the big ones:

• What is the return policy?
• What are the shipping options?
• What are the international taxes, duties, etc. that I have to pay?
• When will I receive my order?
• What do I do if I never received my order?
• What do I do if I received a defective order?
• How do I make changes to an order I’ve already placed?
• Where are you located?
• How is the product made? Where do the materials come from?
• How do I make sure I order the right size?
• How do I contact your company if my question isn’t answered here?