Do you need FAQs or better content?

We’re calling it: Frequently asked questions – FAQs – are a lazy person’s communication. They’re often long, unwieldy and, most importantly, not audience focussed.

Here’s how to point your audiences in the right direction.

Should you write and answer a list of questions your audience might have?

Yes.

Should it be presented in a long article answering every single permutation of a question someone might ask?

No. And let us explain why.

If your audience members are frequently asking the same questions, it means they can’t find the information they need.

Your audience doesn’t read FAQs

Making good content requires a strong understanding of your audience, and how they read online. Research that tracks people’s eye movements shows that audiences typically don’t read webpages at all.

They scan.

When someone lands on your website, they’re quickly searching for the words and phrases they need to assess whether your page will help them or not. They look for visual cues – such as headings or lists – and scan the first few words of each paragraph.

FAQs waste prime scanning real estate on your page. Many start with phrases like ‘What is…’, ‘Why does my…’ or ‘What happens when…’. These filler words bury the keywords your scanning reader is searching for.

To help readers find what they need, keywords need to standout. You can do this by:

chunking text
using keywords at the start of paragraphs and
descriptive headings.

You’re making the audience do the hard work

What can be expressed in 1-2 sentences is often repeated across multiple FAQs to ensure that critical information is seen by people. Add the FAQ filler words (what, how, when, etc) and it’s very difficult for your audiences to engage with your content. These lazy techniques blow out the wordcount, have no respect for your audience’s time and ultimately, don’t help your readers find answers.

Let’s give your audience some credit. Given the information they need in plain and direct language, they can deduce the answers to most of their questions.

If not, they can contact you, and you can build this content into your webpage for the next time someone has the same question.

And, if the information is that important, it should be prioritised at the top, with headings and perhaps even a visual feature to draw attention, such as a feature box.

You’re making it harder for yourself

FAQs are evergreen. This means you’ll create them once, update them every now and then, and hope for significantly less enquiries.

But what happens when you do have an update? Do you update it in one FAQ, or do you review your 1000-word article for all instances of the change?

And when you add another FAQ, how often do you check whether it can be combined with another?

FAQs can quickly turn unwieldly and get out-of-hand. If you update in one place and not another, you risk miscommunication.

A simple update can turn into a complete rewriting of your article. From an original list of 10 you can quickly double it as more enquiries come in that weren’t answered by your existing list of FAQs.

Your FAQs don’t always show up in search engines

Search engines – just like humans – quickly scan content for keywords.

Depending on how your website is coded, the accordion feature, which is mostly used by people writing FAQs, isn’t easily read by search engines. It hides information, and often isn’t tagged as a heading, so is often ignored.

To show up in a search engine, your longtail keywords or SEO keywords (the words people use to search for the information they need), should be an H1, H2, list or in your page metadata.

You should also be running SEO analysis on the keywords you’re using so that people land on your pages. This is difficult and time-consuming when you’ve got a long list of FAQs.

The alternative to FAQs

Short paragraphs with descriptive headings that are optimised for SEO will outperform FAQs. Focus on the content itself and build it around your audience.

And remember, great content isn’t built in a day.