Having a FAQ section displayed on the search results pages (SERPs) will help your site get a better SEO score and easily attract the attention of users. To help search engines understand your page’s FAQ and put it on SERPs, you can create a schema for it. Let's learn how to do it now.
What is FAQ schema?
FAQ schema is a type of schema that tells search engines what are the questions and answers on your site. If this information is useful to the reader, the search engines may display them on the SERPs.
This is a FAQ schema example when you search for the term "slim seo plugin":
Why should we use FAQ schema?
FAQ schema helps a lot in raising the opportunity of displaying your website’s FAQs on the SERPs. This brings you great advantages as following:
- Users can easily get their needed information as well as further one;
- Impress users with different and prominent information on SERP;
- Increase the CTR (Click Through Rate).
Moreover, having FAQ schema helps the search engines easily understand your website content and be aware it is an informative site. Therefore, they will score your website better. So, if you're not doing FAQ SEO, you're missing a big part!
How to add FAQ schema in WordPress?
To add FAQ schema in WordPress, it's best to use a schema plugin. Among popular plugins for schema, Slim SEO Schema is the best one. It's lightweight, flexible, and compatible with WooCommerce, Advanced Custom Fields, and many page builders.
Slim SEO Schema supports all the schemas supported by Google, from site link search box, local business to a product review, and of course - FAQ schema.
This instruction will show you how to use Slim SEO Schema to add FAQ schemas to multiple pages on your website. Make your you already purchased Slim SEO Schema and have it active on your site.
1. Add custom fields for FAQs
To store the questions and answers for multiple pages, we will use custom fields. And we will add them with Meta Box - a popular and powerful WordPress custom fields plugin with more than 700.000 active installs.
To start, go to Meta Box > Custom Fields, and click the Add New button. Then create a group of fields as follows:
| Name | Type | Settings |
| Sets of Questions | Group | Set this group be cloneable |
| Questions (subfield) | Text | - |
| Answers (subfield) | Text | - |
Note that we use the cloneable fields here to have more places to save more than one couple of questions and answers.
In the Setting tab, choose Location as Page, then choose the page you want to put the Q&A on.
Now, when you edit a page, you'll see the custom fields appeared below the editor. Just enter the questions and answers for the FAQs in the custom fields and publish the page.
2. Add a FAQ schema
Go to Settings > Slim SEO > Schema and click the Add Schema button. Then, select FAQ from the dropdown list to add a FAQ schema.
In the FAQ's Properties tab, you'll see the settings for the FAQ schema. Here you need to fill in the Question and Answer inputs.
The best part of Slim SEO Schema is that it supports dynamic variables, which allows you to insert data of post into the properties' values. We need this feature to connect the custom fields that we created with Meta Box to the questions and answers.
Click on the "..." icon in the Question and Answer's inputs to see the list of dynamic variables. Then choose the Meta Box's Question and Answer fields from the list.
Note that besides using Meta Box's custom fields, you can enter questions and answers manually.
Then, move to the Location tab to set where the FAQ schema is for.
In the Type section, I choose Singular to apply the schema for a FAQ page.
If you want to apply the schema to many locations for your FAQ schema, you can easily do it, like this:
Save your changes and go to check the FAQ page on the frontend. We'll need to validate the FAQ schema with Schema Markup Validator.
Displaying FAQ schema with Oxygen
We've added a FAQ schema to pages in WordPress. However, the FAQ schema data is stored in custom fields and not in the page content. Thus, it's not visible when viewing the page.
To display FAQ schema as accordions on the front end, we'll use the Oxygen page builder with the OxyExtra extension. You can apply the same techniques if you use another page builder like Elementor or Bricks.
1. Edit the FAQ page with Oxygen
Choose the FAQ page that you want to display and edit it with Oxygen.
2. Add FAQ schema with the accordion component
Click the Add button and select the Pro Accordion from the component list. This component is created by OxyExtras.
Since I used Meta Box custom fields to display the FAQ schema information, I chose Accordion - Dynamic Items (Meta Box) in the Accordion Type section.
3. Set Meta Box fields for dynamic data
In the Dynamic Data section, we need to connect Meta Box fields to the accordion settings.
So, in the Cloneable group field box, choose sets_of_questions which is the ID of the group field.
To display the questions, in the Header text field box, enter question, which is the ID of the question subfield. And set the Content field box to answer, which is the ID of the answer subfield.
Finally, choose Apply Params to apply the change. Now you can go the see the FAQ page and will see the accordion with proper content from Meta Box's fields.
Conclusion
FAQ schema is not only one of the most loved structured data that SEO people usually use to help Google show more results in the SERPs. With a few simple steps with Slim SEO Schema, you can easily create not only FAQ schema, but also many other types of schemas for your websites such as local business or product review.
So, if you haven't used FAQ schema, it's time to try it now. You'll get more clicks to your website on the SERPs!
Can this work with native Gutenberg block theme?
Seems overkill to install MetaBox just for this, but I love your Slim SEO plugin and would like to avoid using any other plugin for SEO with FAQ integrated.