Guest post by Ann Smarty.

For a few years now, we’ve watched Google focusing on better understanding and answering users’ questions. Google has started giving (what it views as) the best answers additional exposure in search, suggest related questions, and try to answer questions in various visual ways (i.e., knowledge graph and carousels).

So, providing the most complete and useful answer to your audience’s questions will help you achieve more search visibility, more clicks and more brand awareness.

People ask all kinds of questions online every second: if you are able to answer them instantly on your blog, you win! Answer specific questions, answer various slightly different questions: provide useful actionable answers, become THE resource.

For those who have WordPress blogs, I feel there is no excuse to neglect the FAQ page. It is so incredibly easy to create one.

Start Collecting and Researching the Questions

Keyword research tools

Semrush

Semrush has a handy “Questions” section that pulls Google Suggest results and identifies questions. You’ll also see a filter showing you which words tend to appear in questions for your core keyword. It’s a very helpful way to dig deeper into those queries and organize them to plan your content strategy:

Clicking any word in the tag cloud will take you to the list of questions mentioning the word.

Answer the Public

Answer the Public breaks your core query into related questions, visualizing the report and even grouping it by the question word. The questions are organized by question modifiers:

• Which…?
• Who…?
• What…?
• When…?
• Why…?
• How…?
• Are…?
• Where…?

Grouping questions in such a visual way helps creativity a lot. It acts almost like a mind map.

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo has a Question Analyzer section which does something more:

• It analyzes your base word to figure out related terms
• It goes through hundreds of discussion boards (including Amazon Q&A section which is my favorite) to find which related questions people ask there:

This way the tool helps in two ways:

• Discover more terms to work with and create content around
• Find more questions (beyond those enough people type into the search box for those questions to get into Google Suggest results).

Site Checker

A newer tool in my question research arsenal, Site Checker takes the longest to run but it returns so many results you’ll be lost. Look out for the left-hand links to filter keyword suggestions by the question word.

ChatGPT or Alternatives

Generative AI tools can help you come up with more ideas. Just prompt it to create a list of questions your target audience could be asking about your topic or keyword.

Google Related Questions aka “People also ask”

Google suggests related questions for many informational queries allowing people to refine their search.

You can click each of these questions to expand the line and see the answer. Once you start expanding those lines to read the responses, Google will offer more and more questions dragging you down the rabbit hole where you’ll find yourself expanding more and more questions to find the answers.

Also Asked is a great freemium tool allowing you to research those questions.

Your readers or followers

Surveying your visitors to collect what they would like to read about is another great idea. You can use a simple tool like Google Forms.

Twitter/X

Search Twitter for more ideas (Interact with those who ask questions to build connections underway!). You can try and play with different filters:

[keyword ? -filter:links]

keyword ? -infilter:links -http

The beauty of this one is that:

• It filters all the tweets to those containing questions
• It filters out tweets with links (so you get to see only real unlinked conversations)

WordPress Plugins

If you have WP.org, and therefore can fully customize your site, it is worth installing an FAQ-related plugin that will guide you through the process of making a more attractive information page.

My personal favorite is Quick & Easy FAQ’s. The reason why is probably obvious from the title. It is extremely simple to use, and it gives you a few formatting options, such as list and toggle. You don’t have to be a WordPress whiz to figure this one out.

Another couple good ones are Arconix FAQ for a basic toggle style format that has a really casual feel to it, and WP Awesome FAQ Plugin, which is better for advanced users.

Create Video FAQ’s

I love video tutorials. So I am thrilled to see it being put into practice on websites that want an FAQ with a bit more zest. You can create a series of little clips (or a long one with shortcodes to specific times in the description) that tells visitors all they need to know.

Another similar option is to make little animated gifs showing the answers to questions, and post them down the page. I have only seen this done a few times, but it was done really well. They had expanded sections under header titles that could be dropped down to shown a visual representation of the question.

Those mini videos and gifts are great for repurposing your FAQ on social media and developing a diverse digital footprint.

Make sure to always accompany videos and visuals with text answers to provide more food for Google as well as help people who prefer reading or scanning.

Those images and videos will likely rank in Google’s image and video tabs, so they turn into effective link magnets.

Conclusion

Answering questions on your site is a great way to diversify and solidify your organic search visibility. It will also help your brand to be found by Chatgpt and alternatives.

As you can see, you have several ways to make an FAQ, and these are only a few of them. You can do just about anything that sounds interesting to you. It is just a matter of your own creativity.

Don’t try to create anything huge at one sitting: building up a FAQ resource is a continuous effort. Keep adding questions and answers as you discover them, add media (videos, GIFs) to old posts, and work on creating an ultimate resource.

Ann Smarty is the founder of Smarty Marketing, a boutique SEO agency based in New York, and Viral Content Bee, a social media promotion tool. Ann’s search engine optimization career began in 2010. She is the former editor-in-chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs, including Small Business Trends and Mashable.

The post How to Create an Informative FAQ For Your WordPress Blog appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog | Webbiquity.