How should you structure a FAQ page?

A FAQ page is one of the highest-value pages a service business can have and one of the most consistently wasted, and both come from the same source: the questions are made up. Written from what the business would like to explain rather than from what customers ask, the page becomes a marketing document arranged in question form, and it serves neither the reader nor any system trying to extract an answer from it.

The questions should come from your own records, and they exist. What gets asked on the phone, in first emails, at the start of appointments. Ten minutes noting them over a fortnight produces a better list than any amount of deliberation, and the list is nearly always different from what anyone predicted — dominated by practical concerns about cost, timing, access, process and what happens if something goes wrong, rather than by capability.

Phrasing matters and the rule is to keep the customer's words. People ask how much does it cost to fix a leaking tap, not what is your pricing structure. Rewriting into the business's vocabulary makes the question harder to match against what someone actually typed or said, and it also makes the page sound like the business talking to itself, which is precisely the tone that makes readers stop.

The answer's first two sentences have to be complete on their own, and this is where most FAQ answers fail. An answer beginning with qualifications — it depends, every situation is different, there are several factors — has buried the answer beneath a disclaimer, and both a hurried reader and any system extracting a passage will take the disclaimer as the answer. Lead with the direct answer, then qualify. The qualification is not lost by coming second.

One question per entry is a discipline worth keeping. Compound entries that answer three related things are harder to extract, harder to scan and usually indicate that three separate questions were merged for tidiness. Where an answer runs long enough to want subheadings, the question was probably a page rather than an entry, and giving it one serves it better.

Two things to include that most pages omit. The awkward questions — why you are more expensive, what you do not do, what happens if it goes wrong — because those are being asked whether or not you answer them, and answering them plainly is more persuasive than avoiding them. And a date, since an FAQ containing prices, timescales or availability goes stale silently, and a visible last-reviewed date is what makes it maintainable rather than merely old.