FAQ vs standalone pages

If you follow SEO or GEO advice at all, you've probably heard that FAQs or frequently asked questions can be very effective. And it's true they can be, but not for the reasons most people think.

I often joke that half of the SEO agencies out there offering GEO now are just slapping extra FAQs on all your pages. Let's talk about whether this is a good idea and how you can be doing it effectively.

Before we talk about large language models, let's just talk about traditional search engines. I think it's actually a misconception that search engines like FAQs, search engines like the question answer format because it mirrors how people search.

In other words, search engines just like it. When your titles or headings match the words people are typing into the search bar and people tend to search for questions, this makes it easy for the search engine to tell that your content is relevant to their query.

So it's not that the search engine likes FAQs. The FAQ section on your page is just an excuse to list a bunch of questions as headings followed by an answer...

nothing wrong with that. But if you're trying to rank for that specific question, consider whether this question is less competitive than the title of the page you're adding the FAQ to.

If not, you should consider making a separate page with that question as the title. One thing that has never made sense for traditional search is a standalone FAQ page.

This is a page where the title is something like FAQs or frequently asked questions. These pages almost never receive any search traffic because no one's going to Google and searching frequently asked questions.

This is where large language models are different. Large language models love FAQ pages.

This is one of their favourite ways to dive deeper on a topic or on your brand. If ChatGPT or Google's AI mode already knows about your website based on its primary bias or discovers your website based on a preliminary search, it will often visit your FAQ page.

Unlike a traditional search engine, it's happy to look through a long list of questions on a single page...