Video Transcript

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Welcome to the GetNetSet SEO video series for tax and accounting professionals, where we talk about search engine optimization and marketing your business online. In our videos so far, we’ve gone over a lot of foundational elements of SEO. So now it’s time to go over something specific that everyone should include on their website for SEO purposes- an FAQ page or frequently asked questions.

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FAQs are a great way to match both the relevancy and value aspects of SEO and are a fantastic way to organically find long tail keywords. In this video, we’ll go over best practices for how to write your FAQs and how to format and organize them on your website. To start off, we need to keep track of common questions.

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Whenever a client or potential client speaks with you, typically they’ll have some questions about your services, your process, or really anything to do with what you’re offering. If possible, keep a running record of what questions you get asked and take special note of the questions that get asked repeatedly. Once you have a list of questions and are ready to start writing, you want to phrase each question as though a client were speaking them out loud to you.

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In other words, phrase them from the perspective of your client, not yourself. For example, if you offer annual tax preparation services, a common question you might get is how much money you can get your clients back in their tax refunds. You might phrase this from the perspective of the client as, “How much money can you get me on my refund?” In this sentence,

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“you” refers to you, the tax professional offering the service, while “me” and “my” refer to the client. By phrasing your questions this way, you’re matching client language and if you’ve watched our video on keywords, you know that by doing this you can very naturally come up with long tail keywords that people search for. If someone searches for a question you have on your website, your website becomes extremely relevant for that search.

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Once you have your questions written down, you want to answer those questions as simply and clearly as possible. You’re looking to grant that instant gratification answer that many people nowadays are looking for. Our recommendation is to keep your answers to about two to three sentences. And if the answer is “it depends,” that’s a valid answer. Let’s use the same example as before.

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“How much money can you make me on my refund?” Obviously, the answer to this is going to depend on the person. So your answer should state that and then identify what it depends on. Federal tax refunds depend on the person’s income, dependents, tax credits they’ve earned, and more. This is perhaps the most correct answer you can give without analyzing a person’s individual situation, which would make it the best answer for an FAQ page.

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While you can’t give specific tax answers, you can show your website visitors that you have the expertise and knowledge to determine those answers for any given taxpayer. One thing to be careful of with your answers is to avoid using jargon or technical terms that your clientele may not understand. However, sometimes it’s unavoidable. So the best thing you can do is to turn that to your advantage and add another FAQ explaining that technical term.

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For example, if you’re an enrolled agent who helps people with back taxes, you might talk about “What can the IRS do to collect money I owe?” Obviously, there’s a number of options. They can garnish wages, levy assets, or file a lien. Some people may not know what garnish wages, levy assets or tax liens are. You can use these as additional FAQs.

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For example, what is a tax lien? What does it mean for the IRS to levy assets? What does garnishing wages mean? The more FAQs you have, the more long tail keywords you’re targeting and the more value you’re adding to your site. However, there is a limit to how many FAQs you can add before the page becomes so long

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it’s unreadable. So let’s talk about how to format your FAQs on your site. To start off, there’s a few best practices that we want to follow. First, you want to keep your FAQs organized by service. Let’s say that you offer three separate services: tax preparation for individuals, IRS resolution services for people with back tax issues and business tax preparation.

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You’d want to keep these FAQs separate from one another, and the best way to do that is by having different FAQ pages. You can have one individual tax preparation FAQ page, one business tax preparation FAQ page, and one IRS resolution back taxes FAQ page. Keeping these on separate pages helps in two major ways. One, it helps your website visitors find the information that they’re looking for quickly, rather than having to sift through potentially unrelated questions.

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And two, it helps search engines better understand the specific relevance for each page. Your business tax preparation FAQ page can rank for business tax questions but won’t rank when people search for questions on your back taxes FAQ page. Once organized by service, you want to organize the questions on each page so that if one answer sparks another question, the follow up question is immediately after. To refer back to our previous example,

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if you’re answering the question, “What can the IRS do to collect money I owe,” then you might put “What is a tax lien?” right afterward. This helps potential clients who have those subsequent questions, get their answers right away without having to hunt for them. Finally, on each FAQ page, you want to organize the questions and answers so it’s obvious where each question begins, ends, and what each question is.

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There are several ways to do this. The simplest way is to simply bold your questions and leave your answers unbolded on the next line. This works best early on when you’re still getting your initial questions set up and only have a few FAQs, typically less than ten. A slightly different way is using headings, specifically you’re using H2s or header twos for each question.

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This makes each question big, bold, and obvious, while each answer is directly underneath This organization structure is good for pages with a few more questions- around ten to 20. We’ll talk more about these heading tags in a future video. Another way is by setting up an accordion menu where each question is its own line and when clicked on, it expands to reveal the answer.

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This works best if you have lots of questions, typically more than 20. This is a more technical solution and we’re happy to assist our GetNetSet clients with setting this format up if they’d like. There are of course, other ways to organize and set up your FAQs, and you may find that as you write and develop your website you need to reorganize them.

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Don’t feel obligated to use the options presented here. Find out what works best for you and your clients and implement that. The most important part is ensuring visitors can easily find and understand the FAQs on your website. So to wrap up, today we talked about how to write and format your frequently asked questions pages on your website. To write FAQs,

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you want to phrase your questions as though they were coming from the perspective of the client. For example, how much money can you, the tax preparer, get me, the client, on my tax refund? For your answer, you want to keep it to about two to three sentences and provide the most direct instant gratification answer you can. If the answer is, “it depends,”

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that’s valid. Just explain what it depends on. Do your best to avoid jargon or technical terms, but if it’s necessary, then use those terms as the basis of other FAQs. Matching client language in the question and providing a simple direct answer makes your FAQ page extremely relevant and valuable for those questions and related search phrases. And when it comes to formatting your FAQs, there are a couple of best practices.

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Keep your FAQs organized by service on their own page, so each service gets its own FAQ page. On each page, make sure your FAQs are ordered in a way that makes sense. If one answer sparks a follow up question, then have that follow up question immediately after the question that sparked it. The key idea is to make it obvious where each question and answer begins and ends.

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Now, that’s just a quick rundown of how to write frequently asked questions. If you have any questions for us, we encourage you to reach out to us here at GetNetSet.com. Thank you so much for watching and we look forward to seeing you in the next video.