Are Your FAQs on the Right Page?
One of the most important things we, as website owners, must do is anticipate and answer our visitor's and customer's questions in advance. This must be done before they either have to spend time looking for the answer or leave our websites because they don't want to spend the time looking for the answer.
Our job is to make our visitor's job as easy and simple as possible. That means we have to figure out in advance, every possible question that might arise, no matter how obvious the answer might be seem to us.
We can't sit back and say, "Well, of course they'll realize that, who wouldn't?" And, yes, the answer might be obvious to most, but there will be those for whom it's not obvious, and their money is as green as everyone else's. Let's not forget that.
Does an FAQ page solve the problem?
Let's assume we have anticipated every possible question (not likely) and we've placed them all on a specially designated "Frequently Asked Questions" page. Is that good enough? Does that take care of it?
My feeling is that it's not sufficient, it's not enough. Here's the reason why: we're still making our visitors have to work to find the answers to their questions.
Now I understand, we've put all the FAQs into one neat little section of our websites. This does make our visitor's jobs easier, however they still have to look for the FAQ page and click on it and look for the subheading that covers the area of their question. (I do hope, that at the least, your FAQ page uses heading and subheadings to make their search easier).
We can go one better
How about monitoring the FAQ page to see which questions are clicked on the most? If we find that there are a small number of questions that are viewed more frequently, I think that means that the answers to those questions would be better placed in the copy of your web page rather than on a special Frequently Asked Questions page. It might even make sense to answer those questions right upfront on the homepage. These are obviously issues that concern your visitors.
Takeaway
The important thing to keep in mind is that your website is your top salesperson, your top customer service representative, your greeter, your cashier, etc. It's the public face of your company. In most cases, your user will probably never phone you or email you or look beyond your website.
Help yourself, by helping them. Make sure you've anticipated and answered every question they might have and have posted those answers in the best possible areas of your website.
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Rick Henkin
IncreaseOnlineProfits.com
TheSolutionMovie.com
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