FAQ pages

What an FAQ page is

An FAQ page is a set of the questions buyers genuinely ask before they spend money, each answered fully enough that the reader does not need to phone. The questions come from your enquiry inbox, your sales calls and your front desk. They are not invented, and they are not chosen because they are easy to answer.

What it is not is the page most businesses publish. The average FAQ page asks “Why should I choose you?” and “Do you offer free quotes?” and answers both with a sentence that ends in a link to the contact form. That is a deflection page. It exists to look thorough while avoiding the three questions a buyer actually wants settled: what it really costs, what happens if it goes wrong, and how long it takes.

It is also not a help centre. Questions from people who have already bought belong in knowledge base articles, which are written for a different reader with a different problem.

Who this is for

Businesses whose staff answer the same five questions every week. If reception, the owner and the estimator are all typing the same paragraph into email, that paragraph should be a published answer with a link that can be sent instead.

It also suits businesses with an awkward part to the sale: a deposit, a waiting list, a price that cannot be quoted without a site visit, a condition attached to the guarantee. Those things get asked about on every call. Publishing them costs a few enquiries from people who were never going to buy and saves a great deal of time.

You do not need an FAQ page if the questions belong on the pages that raise them. A question about what a service includes should be answered on the service page for that service, not filed away two clicks later. An FAQ page stuffed with material that other pages should have carried is a symptom, and in that case a page rewrite is the cheaper and better fix. And if you are a new business with an empty inbox, there are no real questions yet; buyer question research is where to start.

What goes in it

The work is mostly gathering and sorting. Writing the answers is the quick part.

• The questions, from the record. Six months of enquiry emails, call notes, chat transcripts and whatever your front desk can remember. The wording stays as the buyer said it, not translated into your terms.
• The ones you avoid. Price, lead time, what is excluded, what happens when something goes wrong, and why you cost more than the cheapest quote. If a question makes you uncomfortable, it belongs on the page.
• Full answers. Two to five sentences each, with the actual answer in the first one. An answer that starts “It depends” and stops there is worse than no answer at all.
• An order that matches the buying decision. What it costs and how long it takes go near the top, because that is where they are asked. Alphabetical order serves nobody.
• The questions that belong elsewhere. A list of the ones I would move onto a service, product or contact page instead, with a note on where each should go.

What you get

The page. The FAQ page written and ordered, usually 900 to 1,500 words across fifteen to twenty-five questions, with headings, title tag and meta description.

The question list, sorted. Every question found, marked as belonging on this page, on another page, or nowhere. The second column is often the useful one.

Question blocks for other pages. Where a question belongs on a service or product page, the answer written for that page, so it can be pasted in rather than rewritten.

A short note for whoever answers the phone. The agreed wording for the awkward answers, so the page and the person say the same thing.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A residential moving company in Halifax has an FAQ page with twelve questions. They include “Are you fully insured?”, “Do you offer free estimates?” and “What makes you different?”. The office still fields the same calls all day.

Reading a season of enquiry emails produces a different list. What happens if my closing date moves. What will you refuse to carry. Do I have to be there on the day. How is the estimate worked out and can it go up. What happens if something is broken, and who decides what it was worth. Is there a charge for stairs or a long carry. The new page answers those first, in that order, and says the uncomfortable parts out loud: the deposit is non-refundable inside seven days, pianos and safes are quoted separately, and a claim needs to be raised before the crew leaves. Four questions about packing materials move onto the packing service page, where they were being asked. The page roughly doubles in length and the call volume about closing dates drops, because the answer can be sent as a link the day the enquiry arrives.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you sell, who asks what, and which questions your team is tired of answering. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Scope, price and dates agreed before anything starts.
3. Access to the record. An export of the enquiry inbox, call notes, chat logs, and twenty minutes each with the two people who speak to customers most.
4. The question list. Three to five working days. You confirm the list, and settle the awkward answers, before anything is written.
5. Draft and delivery. One round of changes, then the final page, the sorted list and the blocks written for other pages.

Two to three weeks from first call to delivery is typical for one page and its offcuts.

What it costs

An FAQ page is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, because the size depends almost entirely on how much raw material there is to read. A business with a tidy inbox and good call notes is a smaller job than one where the questions have to be reconstructed from memory. The number is fixed in writing before the work starts and does not change unless you change the scope. The pricing page sets out the four ways of working and how a quote is built.

What happens next

An FAQ page usually shows up gaps in the pages above it. Most of the questions normally belong on the page for each thing you sell, and moving them there is the commonest next job. Businesses with a sales team often turn the same material into answers prepared before the objection is said aloud. Where the questions are about price, the honest next step is publishing numbers without losing the deals worth having. Each is a separate decision, and the FAQ page is complete work on its own.