FAQ pages: what to get right first

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. If you only fix one thing about FAQ pages this quarter, make it the first item below.

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Start here

Answer the questions sales actually gets asked. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Then this

Do not use it to hide bad news. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Eventually

Well-structured FAQs can win rich results. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

The short version

Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. Three things worth confirming about FAQ pages before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Well-structured FAQs can win rich results — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.