FAQ Centralization & Schema Markup

Challenge

Most sites use an FAQ component to address content topics that aren’t particularly marketable, but are nevertheless useful or in some cases critical to the purchase experience. For example, at Pacific Surfliner, some customers wanted to know if they could bring their pet on board. Not exactly the type of information you’d want to promote front and center but still helpful to know. Since we didn’t have an FAQ component at the time to support this kind of content, we had to design and build it but with a couple of important details.

• We needed to be able to add a question and have it appear on multiple pages without having to manage multiple instances.

• We wanted to add FAQ schema markup but in a way so that we didn’t need to actively manage it when an FAQ changed but also to adhere to Google’s rules on duplicate FAQ markup.

Solution

In addition to developing an FAQ component, I worked with our team to create a central FAQ collection table from which individual component instances would be required to source their FAQs. This provides the ability to push the same FAQ into multiple component instances but still manage that FAQ in one place. The table had fields such as:

• Question

• Answer

• Category (used for grouping)

• Status (used to show/hide an FAQ)

And here is what the FAQ Component looked like. As a CMS user, when you add this component to a page, you would have to pick active FAQs from the collection table to include.

Results

• On pages where an FAQ component existed, the usage rate of the booking widget increased by more than 12%.

• Customer service teams felt they were answering the more popular questions less often once the FAQ components were available.

• Increased organic search traffic through greater visibility in the People Also Ask (PAA) box.

Takeaways

• We were able to improve site helpfulness by proactively providing customers with the answers to frequently asked questions.

• Sourcing FAQs through conversations with customer service teams, browsing through online communities like Reddit, and looking for themes within existing PAA results was a helpful way to understand the types of questions that users had.