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FAQ for SEO: Should You Use Questions in Content?

Questions (and their answers) are an important part of SEO and GEO right now. It makes sense, as the many people tend to use search engines and AI tools more like this:

What's the best buy-it-for-life camping brand?

Than like:

Camping gear lifetime warranty

Adding questions and direct, clear answers to your site is a good technique for getting your content cited in the AI Overview or the "People Also Ask" sections in Google results. ChatGPT and Perplexity like this type of content, too.

But as with nearly everything in SEO, it's entirely possible to have too much of a good thing.

What's the right way to use FAQs for SEO?

You should use FAQs only where they make sense naturally on your website. And you shouldn't limit yourself strictly to sections labeled "FAQ," either. Instead, you can naturally work questions into your content — just make the question an H2 or H3 subheading in an article, then immediately answer the question after the subhead (this is key).

If you want an example, reread the subhead and paragraph above one more time. It's structured exactly as I instructed. 😃

How not to use FAQs for SEO

What you don't want to do is put FAQ sections on every single possible page. This looks forced, unnatural, and can read as an "SEO grab" to both people and search engine indexing bots.

What you really really shouldn't do is add FAQs to every page and then apply FAQ schema to each one. FAQ schema should only be used on truly informational, non-sales pages. (It's technically meant for healthcare and government websites, but some people have found it helpful to put this schema on their company FAQs.)

If you have FAQ schema on sales pages, it can mess up your SEO performance over time.

If you're thinking to yourself what the heck is schema oh crap do I have to learn something else? It's okay. And no, you don't. Schema is a way of structuring code around certain website features. It provides additional context to search engines and can help your content be picked up and placed in different results, like the People Also Ask or the map, but it's not a firm requirement. It's better to not use schema than to use it incorrectly. (And if you're using a website builder's template blocks to create your pages, schema may already be applied at times).

Ultimately, you want to get the most benefit out of using questions and answers for SEO you need to:

This is the exact approach I take with my clients when writing content that winds up in the AI Overview and ChatGPT results within just hours of publication. It's natural, it's human-focused, and it's simple—no stressing over code snippets required.