FAQ Answers Showing Under Search Results

What changed last week

Last Wednesday, Google announced that it will show two more kinds of structured data in its search results: FAQ pages and how-to instructions.

Structured data is code, invisible to visitors, that labels what is on a page so a search engine can read it reliably: this is a question, and this is its answer.

With FAQ markup, a listing can show a few questions beneath it, each opening to reveal its answer without anyone leaving the results page.

How-to markup does the same for step-by-step instructions. It suits a business that publishes genuine guides, such as preparing a room for painting, more than one that only sells a service.

Some listings already show them. Expect many more over the coming weeks, as businesses rush to try the feature.

What it can add to a listing

• More room on the results page, pushing the next listing down.
• Answers to deciding questions, such as service area or minimum charge.
• Links inside answers to the pages that cover each topic.
• A sense of openness before anybody has visited.
• Better-prepared visitors, who arrive already knowing the basics.

The last is underrated. A visitor who learns from the listing that you charge for estimates, and clicks anyway, arrives already past the first objection.

The rules that come with it

Google's guidelines for FAQ markup are short, and most of the mistakes come from not reading them.

The questions and answers must appear on the page itself, in full, where a visitor can read them. Markup describing text that is not on the page breaks the rules.

The answers must come from the business. A page where customers post questions and other people answer them is a different type, with its own markup.

And FAQ markup is not for advertising. A question that exists only to deliver a sales line does not qualify.

Markup that breaks the guidelines can lose its rich results, and deliberate misuse can bring a manual action against the site.

Genuine questions only

The test is simple: would a customer actually ask this?

The questions your staff answer every week pass. How far ahead to book, whether you take cards, what happens if it rains, whether parking is free.

"Why are we the best choice in town?" does not. Nobody asks it, and the answer is an advertisement, which is exactly what the guidelines exclude.

A good source is the last month of emails and calls. The questions that recur are worth answering on the page, marked up or not.

Questions in the customer's own words have another advantage: they tend to match what people actually type into a search box.

Where the markup belongs

FAQ markup belongs on a page whose main content is questions and answers: an FAQ page, or a support page built around them.

Repeating the same handful of questions at the bottom of every service page, purely to earn the markup, adds nothing for visitors and makes the markup look like what it is.

Where a service page genuinely has its own questions, specific to that service, answering them there is fine.

The markup itself is usually written in a format called JSON-LD and placed in the page's code. On WordPress, a plugin or whoever maintains the site can add it.

A worked example

A moving company serving a city and its suburbs had two sets of questions on its site.

The first was a real FAQ page, written years ago from customer calls: how far ahead to book, whether they move pianos, what the hourly rate includes, how payment works on the day.

The second was a block on the home page headed "Why choose us?", with five questions such as whether they were the most trusted movers in the region, each answered with sales copy.

When the owner read about the new feature, the temptation was to mark up both.

Instead, the home page block became an ordinary paragraph, unmarked. The FAQ page was brought up to date, with two new questions about storage and a corrected answer on weekend rates, then marked up and tested.

The page that earned the markup was the one that was already useful.

What it does not replace

An answer shown in the results can also mean a visitor who no longer needs to click. For a simple question, that is fine; they still learned something about you.

But the markup only decorates a listing that already ranks. It does not lift a weak page, and it will not rescue a site that is slow, thin or out of date.

Nor is it guaranteed. Google decides when to show rich results, query by query, and valid markup can sit unused.

The page still has to be the best answer to the search. The questions underneath are a bonus on top of that.

Checking it works

Google's structured data testing tools read a page and report whether its FAQ markup is valid, and Search Console has a new FAQ report listing errors across the site.

Both name the problem when there is one, such as a question with no answer attached, which is easy to introduce when the code is edited by hand.

Test the page after adding the markup, and again whenever it is edited, since a question removed from the page but left in the code now describes text that is not there.

That second point catches businesses months later. The markup and the visible text have to change together, so whoever edits one needs to know about the other.

The counter-case

Not every business has questions worth marking up.

A small site where every question is already answered plainly in the main text may not need an FAQ page at all, and inventing one to earn the feature produces exactly the decorative questions the rules exclude.

A business whose customers mostly arrive by referral or by name will see less from it, because its listing is already the one people were looking for.

Where customers genuinely ask the same questions, though, answer them on one page, in full, and mark that page up properly.

Before adding the markup

1. List the questions customers actually ask.
2. Answer them in full on one page.
3. Remove sales copy dressed as questions.
4. Keep the markup and text identical.
5. Test the page with Google's testing tools.
6. Retest after every edit to the page.
7. Judge the page on its content, not the extras.

Step four is where most problems start. Markup that drifts away from the visible text breaks the rule that answers must be on the page, usually long after anyone remembers adding it.

Why the answers belong in the page's own text is covered in Googlebot now sees pages like current Chrome.

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.