A short guide to FAQ pages

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Everything we would tell a client about FAQ pages in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Why it matters

Answer the questions sales actually gets asked. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

What good looks like

Do not use it to hide bad news. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

Common failure modes

Well-structured FAQs can win rich results. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

How to tell if yours is fine

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. Three things worth confirming about FAQ pages before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Do not use it to hide bad news — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.