How to Get Your Website Ready to Answer Customer Questions

You get the same questions every day by text, phone, and DM. How much does it cost? Do you come out to my neighborhood? Are you open Saturday? Do you take cards? Meanwhile, your website has a nice photo, a contact button, and not much else. Those answers can live on your site too, where customers can read them any time.

1. Collect the questions people really ask

Start with what customers already ask you.

• Read through last month's texts, emails, voicemails, and social media messages.
• Write down each question in the customer's own words. If they say "Do you do same-day?", write that, and skip your internal term for it.
• Group the ones that mean the same thing and count how often each comes up.
• Keep the 10 to 20 that come up most.

2. Write answers people can use

Google has a guide to helpful content with questions to check your pages against. A few of them: does the content offer original information, does it show first-hand experience with the product or service, and is it clear who created it?

For a small business, that turns into answers like these:

• Put the answer in the first sentence. "Yes, we serve Austin, Round Rock, and Pflugerville."
• Include specifics: price or price range, hours, timing, and payment options.
• Say what you don't do. "We don't service commercial properties" saves a customer a phone call.
• When something changes, update the text. Don't just change the date to make a page look fresh, which Google's guide treats as a bad sign.

3. Put each answer where people look for it

Put the price and what's included on each service page. Your service area and hours belong on your contact page. An FAQ page (frequently asked questions) can hold everything else.

On every page:

• A title that says what's on the page.
• Subheadings that repeat the customer's question.
• Answers written as text, and not only inside an image or a scanned flyer.

4. Keep your Google Business Profile in sync with your site

Your Business Profile is the listing for your business that shows up on Google Search and Maps. Google's guidelines for representing your business ask for:

• Your real business name, with no marketing taglines.
• A precise address or the area you serve.
• Your real customer-facing hours.
• As few categories as possible, and the most specific ones.

Google also says profiles are for businesses that customers can contact in person during the listed hours. Make sure your phone number, hours, and address match your website exactly.

5. Structured data, with realistic expectations

Structured data is code that visitors don't see. It describes your business to search engines in a tidy, standard format. With Google's local business structured data, for example, you can tell Google your hours and the different departments of your business, like the pharmacy inside a grocery store.

Here is what changed with FAQ markup. In 2023, Google announced on its blog that FAQ rich results would only show for well-known, authoritative government and health websites. A rich result is a fancier version of a search listing, for example with expandable questions under the link. Later, in its documentation updates, Google said that result would no longer appear in Google Search starting May 7, 2026.

Your FAQ page still helps the customers reading it. The FAQ code behind it no longer changes how your listing looks on Google. Back in 2023, Google said structured data it doesn't use causes no problems for Search, and also has no visible effect. If someone wants to charge you for FAQ markup as an advantage, ask them what result they expect.

6. Accessibility basics

Accessibility means people with disabilities can use your site too, including people who are blind or have low vision and people who can't use a mouse. The main reference is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 from the W3C, the group that sets web standards. A few basics from those guidelines:

• Every image that carries information has a text alternative that says the same thing.
• Text stands out clearly from the background. For regular text, the contrast ratio should be at least 4.5 to 1.
• Everything on the site works with a keyboard.
• Forms have labels or instructions.
• Headings describe the topic of each section.

What nobody can guarantee

• A site full of good answers doesn't secure a spot on Google. In its guide to generative AI features, Google says a page that meets every requirement still isn't guaranteed to be indexed or shown.
• FAQ structured data no longer produces rich results on Google.
• Covering the accessibility basics on this list is not the same as meeting all of WCAG.

Steps for this week

1. Go through last month's messages and write down 10 questions in your customers' words.
2. Answer the five most common ones, as text, on the page where a customer would look.
3. Open your Google Business Profile and compare your name, hours, phone number, and address against your website.
4. Ask whoever manages your website to add local business structured data using those same details.
5. Move through your site using only the Tab key and check that you can reach every button and form.

If you'd like help putting your customers' questions on your website, send us a message.