What to put on an FAQ page for a small business

For your trade 5 min read

The FAQ page is the six questions you answer on the phone every day, written down once, in the words your customers actually use to ask them.

Think about the last ten calls you took. Somewhere in most of them was the same handful of questions, asked in slightly different words, answered by you, out loud, again. Those answers are a page you have not written yet.

Where the questions come from

They come from your own phone, not from a list of suggestions or a keyword tool.

For a week, write down every question a caller asks before they agree to anything. A note on the dash of the van is enough. By Friday you will have a list, and the same four or five will be on it repeatedly, in the caller's own phrasing rather than yours.

That list is the page, and all you have to do is transcribe it.

The questions worth writing down first

If you want a head start while the week's list builds, these are the ones most local trades hear.

What does it cost, or what does a visit cost. How soon can you come. Do you come out to my town. Are you licensed and insured. How long will it take. Do I need to be at home. What happens if it needs a part you do not have. Do you take card. What do I do in the meantime.

Keep the last one. A person with water coming through a ceiling wants to know what to touch before you arrive, and telling them costs you nothing.

Answer in the customer's words, not the trade's

Write the question the way it gets asked, including the wrong word for the part. If people call asking about a water heater when the trade word is something else, the heading says water heater. You are not correcting anybody; you are being findable and readable.

Then answer in two to four sentences. An answer that runs to three paragraphs is a service page hiding in the wrong place, and it belongs on the page for that service instead.

Answer honestly, including no

The most useful answers on an FAQ page are the ones that turn work away.

No, we do not do gas. No, we cannot come out on a Sunday. No, we do not cover that town in winter. Yes, there is a service call charge, and here is what it covers whether or not you go ahead.

Do not skip the money question because it is uncomfortable. It is the first question every caller has, and an FAQ that answers eight questions while avoiding that one reads as evasive. If you cannot give a fixed figure, say how you charge, which is a whole decision of its own.

The same goes for anything a customer might discover later and feel misled by. Better on the page than at the door.

Where the answers go besides the FAQ page

An FAQ page is a filing cabinet. Some answers work harder somewhere else.

Put the service call answer on the emergency page. Put the "do I need to be home" answer next to the booking form. Put the payment answer near the price. A question answered at the moment it occurs to somebody is worth more than the same question answered two clicks away, and there is no harm in it appearing in both places.

If your site is one page, the FAQ is a section near the bottom, above the phone number. It does not need a page of its own to be useful.

The questions that are not questions

Skip anything nobody asks. "Why choose us?" is not a question, it is an advertisement wearing a question mark, and readers can tell. So is "What makes you different?"

Skip questions that only exist to repeat a sales line. Skip anything you cannot answer straight. And do not answer a question with a paragraph that avoids answering it, which is the most common way these pages go wrong.

If you would not say the answer to a customer in that shape, on the phone, do not put it on the page.

What an FAQ page can and cannot do for you

It will not stop your phone ringing, and nobody can tell you how many calls it saves. What it does is smaller and more reliable.

The caller who has read it starts the conversation further along, because they already know what a visit costs and that you cannot come tonight. You get a page to point at when somebody asks in a message. And the exercise itself is useful: writing down what you actually charge and how soon you can actually come tends to expose the two things about your business you have been leaving vague.

That is worth an afternoon whether or not anybody ever finds the page in a search.

A checklist for the page

• Every question is one somebody has actually asked you
• The heading uses the customer's words, including the wrong ones
• Each answer is two to four sentences
• The money question is answered, not dodged
• At least one answer is a plain no
• Nothing on the page contradicts your prices or your hours
• The answers that belong on a service page have been moved there
• The phone number is at the bottom of the page
• You could read any answer aloud without wincing
• You know what happens to this page when your rates change

Questions people ask

How many questions should an FAQ page have?

Between six and a dozen for most one-person businesses. If you get to twenty, some of them are service pages and some of them are questions nobody asked.

Will an FAQ page help me show up in search?

It can, because people type questions into search boxes and your page has those questions on it in their own words. Nobody can promise you a position, and a page written for a search engine rather than a caller usually reads like one.

Should I answer questions nobody has asked yet?

Only when you are new and have no calls to draw on. Then use the common list above as a starting point and replace each one as the real questions come in.

How long should an answer be?

Two to four sentences. If it needs more, it is a page. If it needs less, it is a line on the contact page.

What happens when an answer changes?

Change it that week, along with anything else on the site that says the same thing. Stale answers do the same damage as hours that are wrong, which is that somebody believes you and then finds out.

Is an FAQ worth it if my whole site is one page?

Yes, as a section near the bottom. The value is in the answers being written down, not in the page having its own address.