As we have highlighted on a previous section, not all content is about pure content marketing. There are user benefits of having solid FAQ (frequently asked questions) content, as well as SEO reasons. We are always appalled at the way some really large car brands have a lack of content around general car maintenance and how a number of small niche sites spring up to steal that traffic. Here are some examples of FAQ type content that could be considered:
Shipping and Delivery
Shipping policies by product types may seem to be dull reading, yet there is traffic to be had for terms around international shipping, cheap shipping and free shipping.
The term is lucrative enough for whole sites to be built around it:
Similarly, delivery types, such as free delivery, next day delivery etc are all worth looking at and building targeted content for.
Discounts and Voucher Codes
You may not see a discount or a voucher code as an FAQ – we would. Any question in relation with a brand ought to be owned by the brand. So if someone types in “Brand + voucher code” (or variations) then the brand ought to own that term. Yet sites geared to rank for these terms by providing necessary content and discounts are multimillion dollar (or pound!) businesses.
We have talked about this before.
Technical Data
We gave an example of technical data – but let’s look at a live example – assume you were looking for the best oil to use in a Vauxhall Astra:
The actual Vauxhall site is ranking, ranking – but with PDFs that do nothing to answer the query.
This is a type of an FAQ that could be answered well with the right content. Content on technical data could be anything from instruction manuals to straight forward specs. A lot of this is produced within most businesses for internal use, packaging or hard leaflets, but hardly ever transferred to web content. Some of this can be rolled in to the product material section we have covered in the previous section.
Core site functionalities
This may sound like one of the oddest ones – but not all sites are user friendly. Sometimes simple queries such as “how to sign into xzy.com” are worth building out into indexable content:
However good your UX is – if people are trying to figure out how to sign in or sign up, then there is a massive fail. And often enough these users run to search engines to figure out the answer. We find that ecomm sites tend to have a lot of these queries – and it may be worth building content that answers these even before running off to create a clever content marketing campaign.
Customer Common Questions
We always find it amazing that many businesses don’t keep a record of common customer questions, whether they are online, via email, via phone or even in store. Often enough you would find questions that are common along a recurring theme and it is worth answering these as well as possible. Its these questions that people flock to search engines to get answers for – so if your own site isn’t visible due to lack of relevant content, are you really doing the right job for the customer?
Examples of such content are:
- Opening hours by store
- Returns policies
- Delivery policies
- Account details
And the list goes on. A thorough job of making sure that all this information exists and is optimised for search engines would be a key “housekeeping” content tactic.