After creating the basics of a website, I tried to optimize it while taking as little time as possible. So I tried to find out what I could modify for that. I came to the Q&A, but I didn’t really know wether I should do it or not. I know it takes time to create a good Q&A and I didn’t have any experience in doing that. Also, I didn’t know how to do a good useful and complete one. So that’s why I started to learn about it. The first questions I was asking myself were :

• Why to create a Q&A ? What will it bring to my store ?
• How to create a Q&A ? Is there a methodology ?

The reasons why you want to create a Q&A might be multiple, but a Q&A will always have effects that you haven’t thought about. We will see now what are the differents impacts that a Q&A can have.

First, a Q&A show that you know what you are offering. You know your product or service that well that you can already answer questions that prospects might be thinking of. It can give a very good image of your business to your customer.

As shown in several studies, the fact of giving answers increase the sales in a website. (Khern-am-nuai, Ghasemkhani, Qiao, & Kannan, 2016) If you increase the trust of your customers, you will automatically increase your conversion rate. It is even said that “in the near future, trust will remain the decisive factor for success or failure of e-businesses” (Grabner-Kraeuter, 2002). Those studies show how impactful it can be to answer questions and have a trustworthy website. That is exactly how a Q&A can help you to do it. If you do a quality Q&A page, your customers might feel safer, and the impact of this will directly show in your KPIs.

Another benefit of creating a Q&A page in your website is to increase the SEO referencement. By creating an optimized Q&A you will be able to appear more often in the search of multiple search engines, like Google, Yahoo, or Bing for example. This will increase your traffic for free and you will maybe be able to do more sales thanks to it.

In addition, visitors will go through your Q&A page before contacting you if they have any questions or problems. This will reduce the number of emails received, and therefore the time spent answering them. This makes your visitors much more autonomous in acquiring information and contributes to increasing their satisfaction.

Now that we have seen the reasons why creating a Q&A, we will focus on how to create a good Q&A page.

The first thing to do to create a good Q&A is to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. You have to be able to ask yourself the questions that the customer would ask when seeing our site, product or service. It’s important to keep in mind your customer’s persona, and to try to think like them. The writing of the questions and answers must also be adapted to the persona. Try to ask questions the way your customers would ask them and use answers that are adapted to your customers. The language used is a really important point for your Q&A. Try to make the customer as comfortable as possible by using words they can understand and use on their own.

You can also use the Anwer the Public tool, which allows you to find out what words are most searched for, and therefore use frequently used keywords and improve your SEO. In addition, you can also see which words are often searched for in combination with other words, or what are the frequently asked questions related to the selected word. This can also give you ideas of questions your customers might have.

Another important thing to make your Q&A as relevant as possible is to constantly adapt it according to the feedback/emails you receive. These will be your best indicators to see if your Q&A is complete or not. You can then add frequently asked questions to your page to further reassure customers.

Having a clear and logical Q&A structure will build even more trust in the customers who read it. That’s why it’s important to keep it simple. It is often recommended to sort the questions by topic. (Notuxedo, 2021)

Adding links to other sites, or other pages of your site in your Q&A will allow you to improve the credibility of what you say, but also to improve your SEO. (Besson, 2021)

Here is a step by step method that can be followed in order to create a structured Q&A page.

1. You have to answer questions about your products or services. The questions can be about the components, the origin, how is the price set, how is the product created and so on.
2. The payment method is something that customers always want to be sure about. In this section you can tell which payment methods do you accept, and that the payments are secured (if so).
3. If you are selling a product online, I highly recommend you to be very precise about shipping. Otherwise you will have much more of after sales service to do. You can define your delivery time, delivery zone, and prices. You can talk about the method used to deliver as well.
4. People buy with and without accounts depending on the website, it sometimes can be confusing for the customers. That’s why I recommend you to give informations about the need or not te create an account on your website. You also can give informations if they lose their password.
5. The contact part is very important if you want your website to be trustable. You can here give some informations about the best ways to contact you if they have a question, suggestion or a problem.
6. If you don’t have a refund and returns page, you really should put informations about it in your Q&A.

Here is an example of questions and structure that could be used for your website if you are selling products :

Products

Are your products natural ?

Help ! My favorite product is out of stock !

What is the difference between natural and vegan products ?

What does “cruelty-free” means ?

Payments

Which payment methods do you accept ?

Is my payment secured ?

Shipping

Do you deliver internationally ?

When will I get my products ?

What are the shipping costs ?

Which carrier do your work with ? / What is your shipping method ?

Account

Do I have to open an account to order ?

I forgot my password, how do I access my account ?

Contact

How can I contact you ?

Can I make a suggestion ?

I couldn’t find an answer to my question !

The Q&A should be up to date and adapted regarding to the questions you still get by email or on your contact form. The idea is that your customer have all the informations that he would need.

In my opinion, the Q&A page is a must have for every website, if you really want to have the best results and provide the best experience for your customers. The impact of a Q&A has been proven and by reading this essay you should be able to create the best Q&A for your website.

References

Besson, F. (2021, October 16). 10 conseils pour optimiser le référencement SEO de son site. Récupéré sur 1èrePosition: https://www.1ere-position.fr/blog/10-conseils-pour-optimiser-son-referencement-seo/

Grabner-Kraeuter, S. (2002). The Role of Consumers’ Trust in Online-Shopping. Journal of Business Ethics, 43-50.

Ho Trong, N., Svein Ottar, O., & Nguyen Thi Mai, T. (2020). Shopping value, trust and online shopping well-being : a duality approach. Marketing Intelligence & Planning, Vol. 38 No.5, 545-558.

Jumin, L., Do-Hyung, P., & Ingoo, H. (2011). The different effects of online consumer reviews on consumers’ purchase intentions depending on trust in online shopping malls. Internet Research Vol. 21 No. 2, 2011, 187-206.

Khern-am-nuai, W., Ghasemkhani, H., Qiao, D., & Kannan, K. N. (2016, June 14). The Impact of Online Q&As on Product Sales : The Case of Amazon Answer.

Marlène. (2021, July 28). COMMENT CRÉER UNE FAQ EFFICACE ? BONNES PRATIQUES ! Récupéré sur No Tuxedo: https://www.notuxedo.com/creer-bonne-faq/

Xiao-ping, L., & Wen-xiang, D. (2018). The Researches on the Impact of Community Q&A Information Quality on Consumers’ Purchase Intention. Journal of Mathematics and Informatics, 45-52.

Your Europe. (2021, May 19). Guarantees and returns. Récupéré sur Europa: https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/guarantees-returns/index_en.htm#shortcut-3