Easiest method of improving your website’s SEO is using the FAQ schema markup. Properly marked up FAQ pages are usually eligible to become rich results in Google’s search. No matter how old or how new your site is, the FAQ page schema still works great.

By implementing schema markup for your FAQ page, you can improve your website’s visibility as well as increase your website’s authority. This can work even if you almost have no links. Though this is an incredibly effective SEO hack but yet many websites don’t take advantage of this.

So, now it’s the time to get on board and ensure the schema markup is set up on your FAQ page. But first, let’s look at exactly what it is, and why it will improve your SEO.

What is FAQ schema markup?

FAQpage schema is used when you offer a Frequently Asked Question page or have a product page that contains frequently asked questions about the product itself. It is a powerful yet underused piece of code for SEO to help increase your website’s presence in the SERPs.

This piece of code is placed on your website to help Google, and other search engines, to return better results for consumers. Search engines crawl your site, it gets indexed, and then when someone makes a relevant search your content may show up. What schema markup does is provides context to the content. A markup is able to provide context by telling the search engines what the content means.

How an FAQ schema markup can help you win at SEO?

FAQ schema markup powers rich snippets, which often have higher click through rates than ‘regular’ search results. That means more traffic to your site. CTR (click-through-rate) is an important SEO metric. This is measured by the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions a result gets.

For example, if you had 50 clicks and 800 impressions, your CTR would be 6.25%. Increasing your CTR shows search engines that the page is relevant for that search term and it can help your website’s overall search ranking.

How to implement FAQ Schema?

This can be implemented in two ways: Microdata or JSON-LD. Whichever one you choose we strongly recommend you stick to that one. It’s not a good idea to mix them on a webpage.

1. Microdata

Microdata provides a simple mechanism to label content in a document. To implement schema markup with Microdata involves coding elements into your website. If you don’t have a web developer in your team this can be a challenging process where the code is added to the body section of your page.

Microdata example for the FAQ page schema:

What is search engine marketing?

Search Engine Marketing helps put your website onto page one of search engines when someone searches for something related to your industry.

2. JSON-LD

JSON-LD stands for JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data, which consists of multi-dimensional arrays. Google recommends JSON-LD as “Google can read JSON-LD data when it’s dynamically injected into the page’s contents, such as by JavaScript code or embedded widgets in your content management system.” JSON-LD is certainly the easier of the two options, as this code is added to the header section of a page. 

Here’s a JSON-LD example for the FAQ page schema

You can either write the code out from scratch, or you can copy the above code and use it as a template. Just remember to change out the content for your own website.

How to validate FAQ schema implementation?

Validating your FAQ schema implementation is a simple three-step process. 

1. Test

To ensure you have implemented the code correctly on your page, you should use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool. You can add your code snippet here, or the page URL and the testing tool will let you know if you’ve done it correctly or not. There is the added bonus that it will also provide any necessary feedback. 

2. Preview with Google’s Rich Result Tester

This tester will not only let you know if your page is eligible for rich results, but it will also show how the data will look in the SERPs. 

3. Recrawl the page

Once the code is added, and you have run the tests and the page is good to go there is one final step – requesting Google to re-index the page. 

To do this, you will need to log into Google Search Console and enter the modified URL in the top search bar and hit enter. Then you will want to select the option to request indexing. 

In some cases, you can see the effects kick in pretty quickly. Well, pretty quickly for search engines. If you’ve done this for a page that’s already ranking on page one, you should see the results update on the SERPS inside of 20 minutes.

Which pages can the schema markup be applied to?

It’s important to understand Google’s content guidelines when considering adding the FAQ schema markup. The first obvious guideline is that the page must have a list of questions with their answers attached. If your page has questions that users can submit their answers to, you want to use a different type of markup. Instead of using FAQPage, you would want to use QAPage: which is a different type of schema markup. 

Some valid uses of the FAQ schema markup are:

• page of FAQs written on the website. These pages have no way for users to submit alternative answers. 
• Product support pages which list FAQs, that also have no way for users to submit different answers. 

Some invalid uses of the FAQ schema markup are: 

• Product support pages where users are able to submit their own answers to questions. 
• The product pages that allow users to submit many questions and answers on a single page. 
• Forum pages where users are able to answer questions themselves.

You want to use the FAQ Schema markup for pages that are not time-sensitive. Moreover, Google’s guidelines strictly made a condition that you cannot use the FAQPage schema markup for advertising reasons.

Other times when question and answer content won’t be displayed include if the following types of content are on the page: 

• Profane 
• Graphically violent 
• Obscene 
• Sexually explicit 
• Hateful 
• Illegal activities 

And, it is necessary for the FAQ content to be visible to the user on the FAQ page. All this means is you don’t want the content hidden from the user, or for the page to have a brief summary that links off to another page.

What to include in the FAQ content on your page?

As mentioned above, the FAQ schema markup code is easy to implement.But don’t forget, your FAQ content needs to meet all the usual SEO factors to work in concert with the schema markup. This includes aspects such as:

• How relevant the content is to the topic
• The page layout
• How easy it is to read the content

Easy to read content refers to a few things. The first thing is how easy is it to read? Are you varying your sentence lengths and using short paragraphs?.

The second thing is font choice which means the color and size of the font. When it comes to writing for an audience you want an easy font to read that’s a good size and color that doesn’t cause readers to strain their eyes.

And finally in-depth and useful answers are the best rank for SEO. In-depth doesn’t mean lots of words. You can successfully and meaningfully answer a question in 50 words. Because it’s not about how many words you can write, it’s about how well you can answer a question and provide value.  

Advantage of good SEO-driven content with the right schema markup

Schema Markup, helps search engines better understand who you are and what you do. Better understanding promotes better “findability”. This is important because search engines strive to deliver relevant and reputable results to their users, matching their search intent. 

By creating informative and well-written content that provides value to your website’s users, and then adding the correct schema markup, you can get yourself on page one of Google. This helps you to get more traffic to your website and increases your sales and subscriptions.

Conclusion

You can implement the FAQ schema in a matter of minutes and have it appear in a short time. This simple hack can potentially increase the visibility of your brand and helps to  improve the authority of your website. It’s a simple solution that can take a single day to implement across your main question, product, or FAQ page.

Good SEO has a great effect. The more content that drives quality traffic to your site, the better your overall SEO score. That is why it’s so important to boost your content efforts with schema markups.