How to Build the FAQ that Your Website Needs, Regardless of What You Sell.

Many new websites going up often forget one of the most important building blocks of their platform: a frequently asked questions section. Regardless of what you’re selling, be it products or services, the FAQ is recognized as the go-to page for people to visit should they have any questions.

Customer service has become a key part of eCommerce. As there aren’t any human-to-human interactions, any website that offers good customer service becomes much more human and likable in the eyes of customers.

FAQs offer an easy, efficient, and time-saving way for businesses to deliver customer service. Here’s a guide to help you to build an effective FAQ that enhances your platform and your brand.

How to choose your FAQ questions.

The most important aspect that you have to consider when building your FAQ is if you’re offering helpful information. You need to pose and answer as many relevant questions that your customers may have as possible.

To start your build, it’s best to examine any emails that you may have from customers who have asked questions about your business. If one customer can’t find the information that they need, you can bet that another will struggle.
One of the best websites to examine for this factor is the Nintendo Switch FAQ.

The console itself comes with a guide, but the FAQ covers everything that any prospective buyer may want to know, from what’s included with the system to how long the battery lasts.

How to format your FAQ sections.

Scrolling through the internet, you’ll find many different ways in which businesses set up their online FAQs. Some sites opt for a table of contents at the top of the page with guided links for each question, while others simply list out each question and answer from the top.

The more modern way, however, is to present the questions with a dropdown option to unveil the answer.
For example, as shown on the Vegas Slots Online webpage of free games, having a concise FAQ at the foot of the page, including questions and dropdown options, looks elegant and open.

This site illustrates that having a visible FAQ is important to show that the brand wants to help, while the dropdown format allows the website to keep the FAQ as concise as possible.

Knowing where to stop with your FAQ.

People turn to the internet because it’s readily available, easy to use, and convenient. As such, a swamped FAQ section can seem like too much work and not very friendly to customers.

How you format the page becomes very important in this regard, and while you’ll want to have an answer to as many questions as you can, you don’t want to put down too many.
If you can, combine multiple answers into responses to single questions.

The PayPal FAQ features 17 questions in total but, as the questions are fairly generalized, the page is able to appear concise, user-friendly, and also informative. The best example on PayPal is that instead of answering if they accept each type of card individually, they’ve cut the question down to “Which cards can I accept?”

Making use of the FAQ in other ways.

Your FAQ doesn’t just have to lessen the burden on your customer service team and inbox, or offer a friendlier section to customers, it can also help your SEO. Research your competitors, see what keywords they are competing for, and then reinforce your keywords in your FAQ to bolster your SEO standing.

The best way to get a further boost from your FAQ, though, is to create separate pages and hyperlinking from your FAQ to home to these other pages, and between each one.

As you can see on the watches website of MVMT, there are many different sections of general, US shipping, international shipping, returns, and contact all on separate pages.

Make your FAQ easy to use.

Even if you do have to include many different questions, you can make the experience much easier and more friendly to your customers by including a search function.

Twitter offers the finest example of this, with their comprehensive FAQ being made easy to navigate thanks to the big, bold search bar atop the page.

FAQ pages should be part of the foundations of any website offering products or services, but you need to make sure that they are designed in a way that offers a welcoming experience to your website’s visitors.