Google’s FAQ Rich Snippets - What to Know About

Google is known for experimenting a lot with its algorithms to improve user experiences across all the touchpoints. Be it its knowledge graph, Google carousel results, people also ask and what not; there are so many things to explore and make our search experience faster and efficient. One such interesting thing is Google’s FAQ Rich Snippets. 

These are among the most-talked-about updates from Google and everyone wants to get into this to drive more traffic. In this article, we will have a look at what exactly they are and how you can optimize your website to get featured in it. First, we need to understand what Google's FAQ Rich Snippets and why they are important. 

Google’s FAQ Rich Snippets

In simple terms, FAQ rich snippets are a kind of enhanced search-based snippets that follow a pattern of questions and answers. In this snippet, Google picks content from a page that has certain content present in the form of Q&A and is written precisely. Each question that arrives in this rich snippet is clickable and it expands as anyone clicks on it to read the answer. If you manage to get featured in that section of rich snippets, you can easily multiple the organic traffic for a long-term duration. So how to optimize the website so that Google will start showing it in that format? You can choose suitable SEO packages from reputed firms.

How to get started with Google’s FAQ Rich Snippets

Search crawlers seek information that is well organized on the website and is easy to access. For doing this, you need to implement structured markup on your site. You can use any available tool like FAQ Page schema, which enables FAQ snippets to get this job done. Now, let's have a look at the core requirements for enabling this on your site.

There are majorly two things you will need to rank on this feature— questions & answers. You can use plugins like the FAQ Page schema plugin to create this format easily. This plugin easily marks up the subheadings (H2 and H3) into questions and you can also type their respective answers into it. 

One thing you need to know about is that the answers should be written by a single user and you can schema markup the FAQs of a forum or a community. Google considers this factor under their trustworthiness and authority factors. 

Also read Digital Marketing Tips for Local Business in 2021

Where can you add them?

It is up to you where you want them, you can add the FAQ on any page but make sure it follows some basic rules. It should contain at least two questions and the second question should come immediately after the first one. And, once again, you need to focus on the factor that a single user has written the answers as it will improve your chances of getting ranked. 

Google’s FAQ Rich Snippets: What are the restrictions?

Google maintains high quality in every feature it offers and these rich snippets do have some restrictions or moreover some guidelines. First, the answer or the questions should not look like an ad or promotional. It will add no value to the user if it's written with the intention of selling or promoting something. And, if a question is coming multiple times on various pages, make sure one instance appears only one time in an FAQ. 

Many SEO experts debate over implementing structured markup on the home page. Many experts say it's not a good idea to use it on the home page but there is no proof if it can harm your rankings. 

Checking everything is working fine

Once you implement the structured data on your website and optimize the content with important questions and answers, it's time to run a quick test. You can use Google's free tool — Structured Data Testing Tool to run a quick test. This tool will help you check if there are any errors present on your markups so that you can fix them quickly. 

After a week or so, you will also see the markup inside your Google Search Console, under the Enhancements section. 

If you are wondering if these rich snippets only work on desktop, then, it's not like that. These rich snippets work on both desktop and mobile. 

How to find a good question for FAQs

There are so many free and paid tools you can use to extract good questions. However, if you are looking for a free way to catch some important questions, Google is enough in itself. Hit any keyword search and you will find the section of 'people also ask'. Under that section, you will find a ton of good and precise questions that you can include in your content. 

Click on one question, and you will find more related to them below that. Other than this, you can use the content analysis feature of any of the paid SEO tools available to fetch some good questions. 

Does this feature help in your site's SEO?

Of course yes, if Google has developed a new feature for making the browsing experience better, it will definitely benefit the content creator also. You will get a higher CTR on your website and when the user clicks on the web page, the bounce rate also goes down. This is because the user already has an idea of what they will get inside the page and they will read the content with great attention. 

To make this strategy even more powerful, focus on the internal linking of pages as in rich snippets, Google also shows internal links. If your answers appear in the search result and the internal link is also visible, then there are high chances that users will click on it to check out other useful content of your site. 

These were some important tips that you can follow to optimize your site for Google’s FAQ Rich Snippets and generate a lot of organic traffic. You can also run an analysis of your competitors to check out how they are optimizing their site so that you can do better than them. As search engines are getting smarter and quality-oriented, creating genuine and original content has become a fundamental that you need to keep in mind while optimizing.