Why you need an FAQs page on your website
Peter Brissette • September 10, 2019
This is call number five in our monthly training, coaching and Q&A calls. So the one thing I did want to talk about and then answer any questions for you guys related to that or whatever.
One of the things that we've been doing, actually, I've done this from day one, when we started building websites for clients 10 years ago, is adding FAQ pages, frequently asked questions to client's websites.
I wish I could get all my clients to do it. They don't always do it, but we always attempt to get them to put some of that together. There's a couple of ways to do it. So this one's a pretty simple way where you have the question, and you just click a little drop down and it expands out with the answer.
So why do we do this? Why would we want to have FAQ's? So part of this is the process of just trust-building with your clients, with your prospects, and really helping you qualify that prospect better, so by the time that prospect comes to you with a phone call or you know, fill out a form, your online chat or whatever it is that they've already kind of qualified themselves. They're a much more qualified prospect cause they've answered and understood most of the key questions about interacting with you and your services.
That was always my main reason for it in the early days. The other question that comes up a lot in general is how do I come up with content? Like, what is the content that I should be using? So whether that's for my social media, for my website, or whatever. Well, FAQ's are a great place to start in terms of just basic content.
So we have text here for all of these, but these would be great videos to have. You know, two to three to five minute videos that talk about each of these questions. So, now we have a core set of content that we can use over and over again. That's evergreen, that's always going to be important to our prospects because we're answering the most basic questions that people have.
Is that what evergreen means?
When I say evergreen, I mean it's something you continue to use over and over. Right? It never gets stale; it never gets old.
Thank you.
Yeah, we're going to always have it. We're going to use it. It's the basics that you need to have.
It's like what every client should start with, or.
Yeah.
Okay.
Absolutely.
So the other thing that that's really become important with this is the different voice search tools that are out there now. So, you know, we have Google Assistant already. We have Siri on the iPhone, but we also have things like Cortana.
Assisted living in Centennial.
Rose of Sharon Valencia. Serenity House, Assisted Living, Hunters Hill. Centennial, Colorado. Brookdale Greenwood Village Skilled Nursing. Greenwood Village, Brookdale. Greenwood Village and others.
So Cortana's reading those results to me, all these results are on Bing, so if you're a local brick and mortar and you're like, "What's Bing? I don't know what being is." Well, so that's something you might want to find out because Bing's doing that.
Now, we can always ask a question. Let's see. Let's pick one of these. How about this one? What is hospice?
Hospice means a home providing care for the sick or terminally ill.
So now a simple one like that's probably just going to come out of their database. Let's see if I do this. Are your assisted living homes licensed by the state of Colorado?
According to SeniorCaring.com, Colorado's assisted living homes regulations and assisted living homes are regulated by a state to state basis. Every state has a publicly accessible legal document outlining the regulations, licensing, operation and other rules for assisted living.
So it's actually pulling that answer from a website and reading that answer back. So, there's a whole other aspect of, you know, can that be our website? And how do we make that happen?
Obviously, there's a lot of work that can go behind that to make that possible. And then obviously again, this is using Cortana right out from my computer and looking at the search results that come up in Bing. So every different tool's going to have a little bit of a result with that. But as we build out and think about our website, I think the FAQ's a pretty important piece in terms of potential search results possibilities.
So between Alexa ... Alexa now is not just a speaker, it's actually an app. So, I have Alexa on my Microsoft computer here and I can use Alexa. Alexa is an app that can be installed on your Android or your iPhone. So people are going to be using Alexa in more and more places than just with their speakers. And again, Alexa is used in a different search function.
So what I see at some point we'll be able to measure these, you know, what's coming from voice search versus someone typing something in over time. Right now, we don't know 100% for sure necessarily where some of that comes from.
Alexa at this point, there's no Alexa analytics that say, you know, how much did my website come up in an Alexa search?
We'll get there at some point, but right now, at least through Google and anything that connects with Google and Google search or Bing search, that type of information we can track. And typically when I see a full question, my assumption is that probably came from some type of voice search, so Google assistant or Siri, most likely, a lot of the times.
It's kind of surprising Bing doesn't have one.
So I think FAQ's are super important on any any website for any business that's offering any kind of services for those reasons. So anyway, that's it. That's all I wanted to really emphasize today. If you have questions about that or questions about anything else, happy to tackle those.
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The last question that should we follow our competitors on social media? Sure, why not. You know, you want to see what they're doing and see what's happening there. You know if you're going to be active and you're really trying to use social to build your business then having a good idea what's what your competition is up to is probably important. And you know sometimes what I find with so called competitors is that we you know often times find people that we can collaborate with. It doesn't necessarily mean they are competitors so we work with a number of other marketing agencies and provides some services for them for their clients that they don't necessarily do, but they hire us to do it for them. So like I work with other marketing agencies, so they're not necessarily, you know, your competitor and everything. So but yeah, see what's going on you know, investigate, read up on them, see what they're doing, check out their websites, see what they're ranking for. You know, the more you understand the competitive landscape, the more you know what you should be doing and what you need to do.
And the last question that we have is, can you say more about running a test on TikTok yeah, I so I'm not on TikTok I'm not using tiktok. I wind up watching a lot of TikTok videos on Facebook and the Facebook reels. I think it's fascinating. I find it very interesting. But it's not a platform that I've taken the time to jump on at this point. Again, based on where I'm at with strategy and so forth, it's not a fit for me. But anytime you're using any platform, if you're going to do something, you want to come up with some means of measurement. How am I going to measure success? What does success look like? Is it I, you know, posted a video and I got a thousand views. Is that success you know or is it actually driving traffic and are you tracking how much traffic and then are you tracking what happened to that traffic? Did they fill out a form, did they make a phone call? Like what's the, where do you want that to go? So we really need to step back and think about that whole process. Of creating content, I'm pushing this through to, you know, to my website. And this is what I want to have happen. This is what I wanted the results to be. And then how am I going to track it? How am I going to measure it and do that so anytime you're spending, anytime you're doing something new in particular. Or you're spending any money you need to track it all the way through. All the way through.
The next question that we have is if you have a GoDaddy web page already and are having some issues, are you able to switch over somehow? You can build your website on any other platform and then just you just change the domain where the domain points. So yeah, you can do that anytime. Thank you, Peter.
Next question is how powerful are paid plans to things like Google Adwords or whatever it is called now regarding driving traffic, how can you possibly compete when you don't have the cash to put towards such programs? Yeah, so that's where you gotta get creative. So again we're small businesses and we don't have you know, unlimited funds to you know, just throw a bunch of ads up and you know compete with some other big companies so. Again, this goes back to what are the things I can really do better, because chances are your website is getting some traffic and it could be getting good traffic, but if your messaging isn't clear on your website, you're not getting them to take the next step. They're not making a phone call or filling out a form. So where I can put energy and effort is in that messaging and that and being very clear about who I'm working with, the problem I solve, how I solve it. So that whoever does come across my radar, I have a much higher chance of converting that person then someone else. So you know it's not the best product that always wins, it's who's the best communicator. And so that's why I talk about what you own and what you can't can control and making sure that is dialed in. And doing what it's supposed to do so that if you do go I, if I'm dialed in and I know everything is working well with my website and it's communicating clearly now, I can spend a small amount on ads and drive a small amount of traffic knowing that I'm probably going to get a decent amount of conversions because my messaging's on point and so I don't have to spend as much as the big guy. But I can be more effective because I've spent time working on the stuff that really matters. Thanks, Peter.
The next question is, we have a couple more here. What is your choice for a website hosting platform? So if you're going to host WordPress, my number one choice would be sitegroundsiteground.com That would be my top choice for WordPress hosting that, great support and all that. And again, you can have your. Domain on GoDaddy and it can point to wherever. It can point to Squarespace. It can point to site ground wherever it needs to go. But yeah, for WordPress site ground would be my top choice.
The next question is, can other businesses similar to mine attach to my website and then their ads show up on their Facebook page? No, I don't see how that can happen. Thank you.
The next question that we have is I used to utilize local provider gizmo to be able to personally update my website due to its ease of use. If you knew word you could do gizmo. Do you know of a website editing platform that would be as simple. I don't need an online store so our website just needs to be simple clean design that I can update content. So any of those platforms we talked about we believe with Squarespace can do that. Our platform that I mentioned can do that as well. So that's something that I know someone that was asking about that, I'll just give you my contact info. You guys you know can provide my contact info. If you're interested in looking at that, we can we can talk about that one-on-one Thanks, Peter.
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