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I’m sure you’re aware of how important SEO and SERP ranking is. I’m also sure that you’ve seen more and more “featured” snippet type of results ranking at the top of the SERPs. Everyone’s aiming for that “result zero” spot at the top as the featured rich snippet, but in all fairness, the FAQ snippet is a highly overlooked spot to get. Thankfully Rank Math has pushed out an update to make this easier to achieve thanks to their new FAQ Schema block.
What is FAQ Schema?
In case you’re not quite sure of what we’re referencing, you’re not alone. It’s a somewhat new-ish schema markup meant to be able to give quick access to FAQ contents on a page, and it looks like this:
It’s similar to the normal “People also ask” section that we’re already used to, but it’s a group of questions directly tied to a singular SERP result as opposed to the initial search itself. It’s an excellent way to show Google that you’re providing qualified data to the user.
If you have a product you’re marketing, a service you’re selling, or any sort of information that you’re trying to distill about your brand or service, formatting it around FAQ Schema is a pretty great idea. It’s a solid way to get your pages to stand out in crowded SERPs, especially for services or products.
Won’t FAQ Schema stop users from clicking to my site?
There are definitely some concerns regarding this sort of rich snippet in the results pages. The general fear is that, as these results give you answers without having to click onto the actual website, people will get their answer without ever visiting the blog, depriving that blog of receiving a view, session, ad exposure, or chance to get you to click on an ad or affiliate link.
This is actually a pretty big concern for a lot of publishers. Just look at the impact on lyric sites. Google is just scraping their content and offering it in a rich snippet. One such site, Genius, is even suing Google for stealing their content. Part of the reason for the suit is that, as all the information is available in the snippet, fewer and fewer people click through to the site and rob the site of advertising money.
But I don’t think this is as dire as some people may believe. Yes, there’s going to be a lot of people who won’t click through to a site in the FAQ or another rich snippet result. But the fact that your content appears here and gets viewed is most likely a strong ranking signal to Google that your content is worth pushing.
You may not see a direct correlation between the actual FAQ snippet itself, but having the FAQ snippet will show Google that you are providing valuable information to your viewers and thus means that your site will get promoted with more authoritativeness than a site without FAQ schema.
Granted, a lot of this is guesswork and conjecture because the logic behind the Google ranking algorithm is a black box at times. But looking at Google’s embrace of more and more refined rich snippets like related searches, FAQ schema, review schema, and even table of contents-type schema seems to indicate that Google is really looking for these schema markups to indicate quality content to serve to searchers.
How does Rank Math make FAQ Schema easy?
But back to Rank Math and its FAQ Schema implementation. Rank Math has been on a tear recently, adding a bunch of new functionality like the FAQ Schema and things like Google index submission, to name a few. How Rank Math is making this new FAQ Schema available is a bit interesting, however.
At this point, the only way to make use of the FAQ Schema is via a Gutenberg block. Well, the only easy and logical way. They do outline a way to use it with the classic editor, but it’s not pretty. But Gutenberg is the “way of the future”, so Rank Math decided to not implement a classic editor version. Makes sense. And at least personally I’m fine with it. I’m actually learning to like Gutenberg–I’m writing this in Gutenberg right now, actually!
What does FAQ Schema look like, and how do you style it?
The block actually looks pretty dope. There’s a handful of customization options built into the block so you won’t have to be stuck with just one preset (or even a small handful). You can directly modify the text for the questions and answers, the styling of the block, and more. You can easily get this to blend in with the rest of your site and theme.
Of course, you’ll want to do your due diligence and validate the schema markup yourself with one of Google’s schema validator tools, but the Rank Math FAQ Schema should really help take a lot of the guesswork out of ensuring your code is clean and it will render in SERPs properly.
Final thoughts
Rank Math already has a ton of other schema types available and clearly is committed to adding to the existing collection as shown with releasing the FAQ Schema block.
It will be worth testing the results of FAQ Schema and how it affects click-thru rates from SERPs but I’m fairly confident and optimistic that adding some FAQs to pages where it’s warranted will help those pages jump up in the rankings and show that you’re a qualified authoritative source of information.
We’re going to be looking for opportunities to add this into some existing sites to see if there’s any sort of change in traffic or conversions and we’ll be sure to revisit those results once there’s some measurable data to obtain.
But in general, we’re looking forward to seeing more features come to the FAQ Schema block as it gets more use, testing, and development. But it’s starting off at a great point and can only improve from here.
What about your thoughts? Are you onboard for FAQ Schema (and other rich snippet schema types) or are you afraid that these will negatively impact your traffic? Leave your comments, questions, and ideas below so we can get some good conversations going!