Take over the SERPs with FAQ schema

• The most exciting benefit of FAQ schema for SEOs is being able to see questions and answers directly within SERPs. This will help websites become more prominent in search results by taking up more ‘real estate’.

• Increase click-through rates by helping users to quickly identify which source is most likely to have the information they’re looking for.

Google has stated you must not confuse FAQ page schema with Q&A schema. Q&A schema should be used in a question and answer format, think Stack Overflow where you can vote for a best answer. It is recommended you use this schema solely on FAQ pages. However, it works perfectly to be cheeky and have your FAQs housed on a service or product page to get better value from this.

No, the questions do not need to be relevant to the topic. Although, relevant questions and answers will likely result in more clicks on your page, as viewers will believe that your page will satisfy their intent, where irrelevant questions and answers will have the opposite effect. However, with that said you could also consider displaying company USPs directly within the SERPs, as well as FAQ questions and answers.

No, the content does not need to be visible on the page using JSON-LD, however, if you are using microdata the content must be available.

1. Google guidelines state that any mark-up included should reflect content that is visible on-page, so although your FAQ schema will appear in SERPs simply by adding the Schema snippet to your page source, we wouldn’t recommend doing this.

2. Add internal links where possible. If your FAQ answer fully satisfies the user query then utilise internal links to relevant pages to provide additional value. You can also use anchor links to take the user to a specific section of your page where they can find more information.

3. Use your CTAs! Make sure to include ‘Learn More’ or ‘Find Out More’ to engage the reader and encourage a higher CTR. Here’s a Honcho tip: Combine your CTA with an internal link to encourage traffic to visit your page.

4. Don’t give too much away. It’s important to answer the FAQ within your answer, but you don’t want to sacrifice traffic to your website. Make sure that you leave the user wanting to find out more.

In short, yes (with our little workaround). You can include both internal, external and anchor links within your FAQ answers using both microdata and JSON-LD (requires a small change to your content).

Using microdata, you can wrap your FAQ answer as normal, and if it contains an internal link this will display in your rich result. For the JSON-LD method, you must use a forward slash to escape the speech marks that wrap your linking URL. Otherwise, your formatting will be affected, and it won’t work.

Yes, Bullet points can be included within the FAQ results. However, bullet points and numbered formatting using < ol > (ordered list) and < ul > (unordered list) will be stripped from the Google results. Google will also remove any breaks within the answer text and format the text as one paragraph. If you want to display bullet points or ordered lists you will have to insert the unicode such as & #8226 (with no space); or & bull;. You can find a full list of unicode bullet points here.