What Are Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)?

Google's BERT update stressed that search is now all about long-tail and conversational content to give searchers the ‘single right answer' and with 46% of all searches carried out online having local intent and 80% of all searches consisting of informational intent. FAQs have become an essential asset for businesses to meet these search and customer intent requirements. FAQs are a natural platform for business to structure conversation content with informational intent suiting the search engine's approach to improve the user experience of customers online. Subsequently, by creating content with such an approach, the business is automatically optimizing to be the voice search answer. That said, the power of FAQs aren't just limited to creating informational and conversational content for voice search, and FAQs go beyond these benefits in helping a business. Including the voice search benefit, let's take a look at why your business needs FAQs on its website:

Searching and not finding answers about a business can get frustrating. By proactively answering common questions about their products, services and business details (location, hours of service, special status mentions, etc.), businesses deliver a superior experience to customers looking for answers

FAQs improve the chances of SERP saturation of the content as a featured snippet, as an FAQ, in the People Also Ask section, in the Local 3-Pack and as an answer for a How-to query

The question & answer format of FAQs match the conversational answer type of voice search. Therefore, there are higher chances of FAQs getting picked as a preferred voice answer and getting placed as a featured snippet on search for being the most relevant answer

Customers use multiple channels to look for answers about a business. If FAQs are managed well and are consistent across all channels, it builds trust with potential and existing customers. In fact, according to Forbes Magazine, having consistent brand answers improves the business's revenue by 23%.

By publishing answers to commonly asked questions, businesses can reduce the time spent by sales & support teams in individually answering the same question to multiple customers