Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello, welcome back to SEO is not that hard. It's me, ed Dawson, here, your host, as usual.

I don't know what it's like where you are in the world, but here in the UK it's very much turned to autumn, the temperatures have dropped and it's the first time today, recording this, that I've actually lit the wood burner in my study. That's my one little luxury for my study is the wood burner I put in. Today we're going to talk about frequently asked questions and, just as an aside, a frequently asked question I get about wood burners is aren't they bad for the environment? Well, we live in a rural area, so the smoke pollution, you know, is immaterial in a place like where we live here, because it's just so small. It's not like we're in a big city, but in terms of the wood, we burn. All the wood we burn here in our farmhouse is from harvested on our own farm. We've got a lot of trees on the farm and they just naturally die off over time. You know we get enough trees die every year or drop branches every year that we just harvest up what's um, you know what what naturally dies. Basically we um season it naturally. We don't. You know we're not buying logs that have been seasoned in kilns. You know we just leave our wood out our undercover to season for a couple of years and then we chop it up and then we burn it.

The K-8 does release carbon into the atmosphere, but it's only carbon that's recently, historically recently, maybe in the past 50 years or so has been sucked in by those trees growing. The real problem with carbon emissions is from fossil fuels, where this carbon has been locked up underground for millennia, millions of years in many cases, and that has suddenly been re-released into the atmosphere. There's always been a natural carbon cycle in the world, with things burning, things dying, releasing the carbon back into the atmosphere and that cycle going on. That's why, for example, you know they're looking at sustainable aviation fuels being grown from crops. So you grow crops, certain crops you can turn into biofuels, which you can turn into aviation fuel. So, yeah, that's a frequently asked question that we, I guess, sometimes get asked about.

Why have a wood burner? In terms of the heating of the rest of the house, we're very green. We've got a heat pump. We only buy renewable energy, so we already take very seriously the use of fossil fuels. But you have my wood burner. I don't lose too much sleep over it, so that's an aside.

But that's how answering FAQs can increase engagement, and that's what I'm talking about today increasing engagement by using FAQs on your web pages. And this topic today was inspired by a post I saw on LinkedIn by a lady called Tass Boba who'd shared some stats she'd built up from her own site some sites she works on where they found that by putting clickable faqs on pages would increase page engagement and actually became the most engaged with parts of the pages that she was testing it on. She thought it would be testimonials that would be the most engaged with parts of the site, but actually she she found that it was the FAQs that were getting most of the engagement. Sometimes 20 plus percent of the engagement on a page was going to the FAQs, which is across all the elements of the page that she was looking at. It's really quite high and this is something that I've always been a strong believer in that you answer people's questions. A is a way to help convert them better, stop them going to other websites and increasing that engagement on your page, and also is a strong way to help build your rankings, because the more questions you answer on your page, the more questions you're going to be able to rank for online on the search engines, and answering questions that people have on the site is going to increase their perception of you being an authority.

So, like my little example at the start, where I just talked about the frequently asked questions about using a log burner, you may have known all the facts that I just spoke about then about how they work, the carbon cycle and things like that. I mean I didn't go into it in too much depth because I didn't want to bore you depth, because they don't want to bore you, but at least I give you that extra little bit information about why I use one and why it's actually a greener option than using, say, fossil fuels to heat a home, and that kind of level authority and your site on your topic can really help make you stand out, especially if you're like e-commerce and you're trying to be the retailer that people choose. People are more likely to buy off a retailer that they believe is an expert, because you know they're going to know that a that retailer is going to choose products based on their quality or, at least, if it's on price, they're going to try and find the best quality for the price that they're going for. And also you'll know that if you have problems with that product, that person or that that company is going to be more likely to be the one that's going to be able to help you sort any issues you have, rather than someone that's just shifting boxes and doesn't really care for the products that they're selling. So this is why you know my philosophy of basing your content on answering people's questions, which is fundamentally those faqs, is really really important part of your content strategy that you should be considering and that's why you know shameless plug here, which I do now and again, for keywords people use. It will help you find those questions that people are asking across any product, any brand, any topic that you want to know about. You can use keywordspeopleusecom to help you find those and those are the questions that real people are asking online, and that's the key here is to actually make sure the FAQs cover what people are actually asking. You don't want to give them effort, you know, don't matter, don't? They don't care about or they're just too obvious. You need to use the be using the ones that people are actually asking.

And again, with this um, the task Bob was, bob was talking about and also a guy called Jesse Dukes um chimed in on the conversation there and said he he followed up and he tested her hypotheses and found that he was getting the same results as she was shows that having those critical FAQs and making them sometimes more prominent in your copy or on the page or more easily found, especially from above the fold. So at the top of the page you've got FAQs at the bottom, which tends to be where people tend to put them. At the bottom of the page At least. Try and make sure there's a link to them, an anchored link at the top of any page where there's FAQs, so that people know quickly how to see them, how to find them, even if they're just available on the page. That will help improve that engagement and we know from the Google leaks the API leaks how much Google values engagement on page and if you can do anything to increase those engagement metrics, that's only going to be good for your site.

So if you aren't using faqs, where, rather than on your site send seriously, do it. It's what I've based my content on for many, many years. Go and look at um broadbent code, uk. Look at it in the way back machine. Look at it when it was my site. You'll see how so much of the content there was based around frequent asked questions, even if it didn't say faq. You'll see there are questions and it's all the way through the pages and those questions are answered and that answering people's questions creates that content that google loves. It creates content that people enjoy to want to read and will engage with and seriously add it to your content strategy anyway. Anyway, that's it from me today, so until next time I'll see you later.

Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools at Keywords People Use that you can book a free, no obligation, one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up Once again. That's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon. Thanks for being a listener. I really it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps.

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