The FAQ: answering the questions people really type

People do not type product names into Google, or not only. They ask questions: “how to descale a heat pump”, “how much does a diploma recognition cost”, “do I need a permit for a pergola”. Anyone who has read the Performance report in their Search Console, presented in part three, has seen it in their own figures: a surprising share of queries are full sentences, interrogative, very specific.

That is exactly where a questions-and-answers page, an FAQ, finds its strength. Not through magic: through matching.

The fishing net, an honest image as long as you finish it

An FAQ is readily compared to a fishing net: every question added is one more mesh, every wording taken from customers’ own mouths is a possible way in. The image is fair, but it has to be finished: a net only catches fish where there are fish. An FAQ only pays if its questions are the ones people actually ask, in the words they actually use.

Hence the only method worth anything: start from the questions received, not the questions dreamed up. The ones from the phone, from e-mails, from quotes, from objections in meetings. Google’s guide recommends anticipating the terms users would type: nobody knows them better than the person who answers customers all week long. And every answer must answer, completely, within the first two or three sentences, the way you would answer out loud. An FAQ whose answers point elsewhere without saying anything is a table of contents in disguise, and the helpful content criterion applies to it as to everything else: does the reader leave with their answer?

A corollary that keeps things tidy: when a question deserves six hundred words, it deserves its own page, with its own title, and the FAQ states it in two sentences then points there. The FAQ catches the question; the page goes deep.

What no longer works, and will still be sold to you

For years, a piece of technical markup known as “FAQ structured data” allowed you to display your expandable questions and answers directly on the results page. That time is over: Google first restricted this display in 2023, then removed it entirely, and its FAQ documentation was retired in 2026, the official update log stating that the feature no longer appears in the results. If someone sells you “FAQ markup to appear on Google” today, they are selling you a dead feature.

This takes nothing away from the FAQ page itself, and that is the point to grasp: what attracts is the content that matches the query, not the technical label stuck on it. The value was in the answers; it still is.

What translation multiplies

The German-speaking, Italian-speaking or English-speaking customer asks the same questions, in their language, with their own words. A translated FAQ therefore extends the net into other waters, and it is one of the most profitable contents to translate: short, self-contained units, aligned directly with queries. On one condition, laid down in part eight: a real translation, at its own address, tied in with hreflang, with title and description in the language, and questions reworded the way they are asked in that language, not traced word for word from the French.

In short: answering precisely the questions your customers ask, in their words, and doing so in each of their languages, remains one of the surest ways to widen a site’s audience. Not because Google “loves FAQs”, but because search is made of questions, and a page that answers is what the engine exists to find. The house follows its own advice, by the way: its own frequently asked questions are online.