How do you come up with your FAQ?

Hey, for us it's whenever we get asked a question by someone we ensure we answer it so we can point people to it in the future. We also use a mix of analytics, reaching out to users, and being proactive as well.

I posted this on the IndieHackers London Slack: How to create an effective FAQ page for your website. Hopefully this gives you some aspects to create an effective FAQ section on your website. It’s more general tips than fetching the questions themselves, but hopefully it provides some use!

• Add a search. Without a search, how is anyone meant to find an answer to their question. This is a must. Your search must be capable of easily finding the correct search term (Sounds ridiculous, but it’s a thing).
• Make your questions clear. Pose your questions with clearly defined language. For this it’s bespoke to your website, do you use certain terminology for parts of your service/product that only customers know? You need to know the kind of language your users will be using.
• Have at a glance answers and in-depth pages/read more. Sometimes you could answer something with a simple one line, but if you feel you need to elaborate, do so with read more functionality on the page, or a separate page entirely.
• Add filtering - Sometimes your users might not know what they’re looking for exactly, if you can add tagging it allows them to find the question, and then the answer.
• Make it look nice - No one wants to navigate an ugly FAQ section.
• Allow people to ask questions - This is a benefit for you and the user, if they can submit a question alongside their email, it allows you to have better coverage on the FAQ’s for future customers, and you can personally message a user when they’re done. That’s a great way to also market brilliant customer service.
• Have analytics running on search terms - Similar to the above, this will help you answer unanswered questions, and also find out more on the language your users are using.
• Ask your customers directly what they want answered - This requires you reaching out to your user base, but again, you get more coverage.

I run a website for a large corporate that handles FAQs so should be able to answer any questions you might have!

In the past, I've mostly just tried to come up with questions I thought I'd be asked, or looked at competitors and saw what questions they put on their FAQ pages. There's probably a disconnect between what people ask when contacting customer service and what ends up actually making it to a FAQ. I imagine most people don't add to their FAQ page very often.