All You Need To Know About FAQ Schema

All You Need To Know About FAQ Schema

FAQ markup, along with HowTo markup, is a recent addition to the schema markup library. Each new form of schema markup that becomes accessible contributes to the generation of rich snippets, offering a new chance to experiment with the SERPs. Along with this, the content on the site is presented in a much more organized manner.

So, with this new tool in our digital marketing armory, it’s worth looking at what we can accomplish with FAQ schema and what you need to do to effectively apply it on your site.

If you want to learn more about the schema in general, check out our previous tutorial on successfully utilizing schema markup.

FAQ Schema

What Exactly Is The FAQ Schema?

The FAQ schema is a piece of code that you post on your website to notify search engines that you can present the content area in a series of questions and answers.

When you integrate the FAQ Schema properly on a web page, you can utilize the content in search engine-rich snippets and appear in Google Assistant queries.

This type of markup enables you to immediately present information within search results for any inquiries on a single page. This brings up a bunch of worms concerning Google attempting to keep consumers within the SERPs, but we’ll get to that later.

Google’s FAQ schema documentation, as well as the official Schema.org site, may be accessed.

What Are The Directives For The FAQ Schema?

There are a few requirements that you must follow for FAQ markup to validate and potentially show as a rich result correctly.

  • The language you’ve supplied in the markup – both the question and the response – must show on the page.
  • The page’s content must have been written by the site rather than user-created.
  • It may also be used for product pages, with FAQs providing more information.
  • Invalid implementations include forum pages and product pages, which allow users to submit alternative answers to questions.
  • You cannot use FAQ markup merely for promotional purposes; it must truly answer queries on the page.

For the markup to validate, three more characteristics must be present: FAQ Pagetype, Question, and Answer.

How Does A Valid FAQ Schema Appear?

Using this page as an example, here is how FAQ markup for the first question on this page might look:

{

  “@context”: “https://schema.org”,

  “@type”: “FAQPage”,

  “mainEntity”: {

    “@type”: “Question”,

    “name”: “What is FAQ Schema?”,

    “acceptedAnswer”: {

      “@type”: “Answer”,

      “text”: “FAQ schema allows you to markup the contents of a page which are in a classic question and answer format. With the use of proper markup, you can then present these answers within search results.”

    }

  }

}

Those mentioned above three needed properties are all given, in the form of property arrays for type, mainEntity, and acceptedAnswer.

Creating this markup is straightforward due to the small amount of information necessary. Additional programs will generate this markup for you, such as Merkle’s Schema Markup Generator.

The Structured Data Testing Tool or the Rich Results Test will allow you to validate your markup.

How Can The FAQ Schema Be Applied?

Having this space in the SERPs looks to be an excellent opportunity – as is the case with rich snippets in general. I mean, look at how much room they’re taking up.

With that in mind, it might be quite tempting to mark up all question-led pages on your site with FAQ markup to obtain a featured snippet. In the case of the preceding example, it is quite beneficial to the user. They can acquire their answer without visiting a website, which appears to be Google’s goal.

The text on the page for that specific response is identical to what is seen in the highlighted excerpt. There is a CTA on the website — not the text in the clip.

Marking up all questions may result in a snippet but may also result in a decreased click-through rate if you aim to bring users through to the page. The user has already responded!

Is It Worth Worrying About FAQ Schema?

Essentially, testing is the best course of action in this situation. Simply marking everything up might lead to problems like the ones mentioned above, where impressions increased but click decreased since there was no incentive to go through to the page.

John Mueller stated that just because something is conceivable does not mean you should do it.

As with most things in SEO, test them out for yourself to determine whether they’re useful.

If you utilize internal links within the markup, they must still represent the page’s content — there must be an internal link on the page itself.

It remains to see whether using internal links within these snippets increases clicks, but it is an area you may test. It may be the next great thing, or it could go away in a month. But that’s half the fun. Check out other posts on our site for additional technical SEO advice. Contact us immediately if you need assistance generating FAQ Schema for your website or any other technical SEO work to increase your Google results.