Local FAQs

What local FAQs are

Local FAQs are the small, practical questions a person asks about visiting or hiring a business in a particular place, written out and answered in full: where to park, what time you close on a Saturday, whether you come out to the next township, what the callout fee is, what happens at two in the morning, which neighbourhoods are covered. Plain facts, plainly stated.

They are not the same thing as an FAQ page, which collects everything a buyer wants to know about what you sell and how you work. Local FAQs are the geographic subset, and they usually do not want a page of their own. They belong on the local page for the place they concern and on your business listing, where the person asking already is.

Why these particular questions

Because these are the ones people type with a place name attached, and they type them at the moment they are deciding. “Is there parking at”, “open on Sunday”, “do they come out to”, “emergency callout charge”. A search like that is not research. It is somebody with their coat on, or somebody standing next to a problem, choosing between you and the next result.

They also happen to be the questions an answer engine can lift cleanly, because each has one short factual answer. A page that says the callout fee plainly, in a sentence, is quotable. A page that says “contact us for a quote” is not quotable and is not chosen.

You do not need this as a separate piece of work if you are already commissioning local pages, because the answers are written into those pages as part of the job. Buy this on its own when the local pages exist and are silent on the practical things, which is the usual failing.

What gets answered

The list is drawn from what your own phone gets asked and from what people in your area actually search. It is short by design.

• Getting to you. Parking, including whether it is free, where the entrance really is when the sign is on a different street, transit, and accessibility.
• Hours, including the awkward ones. Weekends, statutory holidays, lunch closures, the last appointment of the day, and whether the published hours are when you answer the phone or when somebody is at the counter.
• Catchment. Which towns and neighbourhoods you cover, named, and which you do not. The honest boundary is more useful than a long list.
• Money for showing up. Callout and travel charges, minimum job size, whether the fee comes off the bill if the work goes ahead, and what changes after hours or on a holiday.
• After hours and emergencies. What happens when someone phones at night, how quickly, and the rate. This is the question people search in the worst mood, and the one most sites refuse to answer.

Each answer is written so the first sentence is the answer. The detail follows for whoever needs it, and no answer ends by telling the reader to call and ask the thing they just asked.

What you get

The answers, written and placed. Usually ten to twenty questions, each with its answer, and a note saying where it goes: which local page, which section of it, and which fields on your business listing. Placement is half the value, because the same answer works differently in each spot.

The listing version. The same answers cut to the limits your listing imposes, ready to paste into the questions section, so the listing and the website say one thing rather than two. If the listing needs more than that, it is Google Business Profile copy.

The change list. One short page of the places where your site currently contradicts itself or says nothing: two sets of hours, a callout fee mentioned on one page only, a service area map that disagrees with the text.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A veterinary clinic in a converted house in Guelph is asked the same four things constantly: where to park, whether they take emergencies after six, whether they see rabbits, and how far out of town they will do a farm visit. The website has a contact page with a map and nothing else. The building's own lot holds four cars and most clients end up on a side street with signed restrictions.

Fourteen questions are written and answered, and the important part is where they land. Parking, hours and the accessible entrance go on the contact page and into the listing. After-hours cover, the fee and the number get their own short section on the home page as well, because that is the one people need at nine at night. The farm-visit radius and its travel charge go on the large-animal service page with the townships named. The rabbit question turns out to be worth its own short page, because people search for it with the city name and the clinic is one of two places in the area that does it.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What the phone gets asked, what the answers actually are, and what your site currently says. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Agreed before anything starts. This is a small job and the price reflects that.
3. The question list. Built from your call, from what your staff report, and from what people in your area search. You confirm the answers, because only you know them.
4. The writing. Three to five working days for a set of ten to twenty, with the placement note for each.
5. Delivery. The answers, the listing version and the change list together. Pasted in by you, or entered as CMS content entry.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call. It depends on how many questions there are and how many pages and locations the answers have to be placed across. It is one of the cheapest pieces of work here and is usually added to a set of local pages rather than bought alone. The pricing page shows how fixed pricing works here and the published bands for the services that have them.

What happens next

If the local pages these answers sit on are thin, local SEO pages is the next job, and service-area pages if the catchment question keeps coming up for towns you drive to. Where one answer deserves to be the lifted result, snippet optimisation shapes it for that. This work is complete on its own and nothing further is assumed.