A Frequently Asked Question Nobody Asked

What an invented question looks like

Why should I choose you. Do you offer a quality service. What makes you different. Are your staff experienced.

Nobody has asked any of those, in that form, ever.

They are sales points converted into question shape, which changes nothing about them except that the page is now mislabelled.

A reader who arrived expecting answers finds a pitch with question marks, and stops reading the section entirely, including the two real questions further down.

Where the real ones come from

• Your phone, which asks the same things weekly.
• Your inbox, where they are written down already.
• The enquiry form, in the message field.
• Questions on your listing, if anybody has asked.
• What staff get asked on site.

The third is the most overlooked. Every enquiry message contains the questions somebody had before contacting you, and a month of them is a ready-made list nobody has read as a set.

The test

One question, applied to each entry.

Can you name a specific occasion somebody asked this.

Where you can, it belongs. Where you cannot, it is something you wanted to say rather than something anybody wanted to know.

Apply the same test to the wording: is this how they ask it, or how you would phrase it.

Customers ask do you do gutters, not what guttering services do you provide, and using their phrasing matters for the same reason it matters everywhere else.

Awkward questions belong here

Which is the main reason an honest section outperforms an invented one.

Why are you more expensive than the last quote I got. How long is the wait. What happens if it goes wrong. Do you charge for a call-out.

Those are the questions people actually have and are the ones businesses leave off, because answering them is uncomfortable.

Answering them is also the whole value of the section, since anybody can publish the easy ones.

A section containing three awkward questions answered plainly does more than twenty comfortable ones.

It also filters, since the people put off by an honest answer about price or wait time were going to be put off later at greater cost to both sides.

A worked example

A business had twelve questions on its site, of which two had been asked by real customers.

They went through three months of enquiry emails and wrote down every question, which produced a list of nine that recurred.

Four were about price and timing. Two were about whether the business covered a particular area. Two were about what happens if something is found once work starts. One was about parking.

They replaced all twelve with those nine, in the customers' own phrasing, answered directly.

The calls asking those questions dropped noticeably, and the enquiries that came arrived further along.

The parking question, which had seemed too small to publish, was the one customers mentioned most.

Small questions matter more than they look

Worth stating, since the trivial-seeming ones get cut first.

Where do I park. Do I need to be home. What do I need to move beforehand. Do you take cards. Will there be dust.

Those are the practical questions that decide whether somebody books today or waits until they can ask, and waiting frequently becomes never.

They are also cheap to answer and nobody else publishes them, which makes them disproportionately useful.

A section answering five practical questions is more use than one answering three philosophical ones about your approach.

Where the answers should live

A structural point, since a question section is not always the right place.

A question that most visitors have belongs in the main content of the relevant page rather than in a list at the bottom.

Burying what the job costs in a question section, when everybody wants to know, hides the most important thing on the page.

The section is for the questions a minority have, which do not warrant a place in the main flow but are worth answering.

Where a question keeps coming up in enquiries despite being answered in the section, that is a signal to promote it into the page proper.

Keep it current from the same source

Since the list should change as the business does.

Once a quarter, look at recent enquiries and note anything asked more than twice that is not on the page.

Remove anything nobody asks any more, which happens as you answer things better elsewhere.

That keeps the section short, which matters, since a list of thirty questions is not read by anybody.

Eight to twelve is enough for most small businesses and is roughly what actually recurs.

Answer them properly, not briefly

A point about the answers rather than the questions, since a real question can still be wasted.

An answer of yes we do, or please contact us for details, has taken a genuine question and declined it.

Give the actual answer: the figure, the number of days, the conditions, and what to do if the reader is an exception.

Two or three sentences is usually right, and a question needing more than that is a page rather than an entry.

The test is whether somebody reading only the answer could act on it, which is the same standard as anywhere else and is failed most often here because the format invites brevity.

The counter-case

A few invented questions are harmless.

Some genuinely useful information has no natural home and a question format is a reasonable container for it, provided the question is plausible.

There are also fields where a small number of standard questions are expected, and their absence would be noticed.

And a business with no enquiry history to draw on has to start somewhere, in which case borrowing plausible questions is fine until real ones arrive.

Take them from what people ask, use their wording, include the awkward ones, and keep the list short.

What to do

1. Read three months of enquiry messages.
2. Write down every question asked.
3. Keep the ones that recur.
4. Use the customer's wording.
5. Include the awkward ones.
6. Keep the small practical ones.
7. Promote the common ones into the page itself.

Step one supplies the whole list, and it is an hour with material you already have rather than an exercise in imagining what somebody might want to know.

Building a page around one recurring question is covered in the question you answer on every phone call.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.