How to add FAQ schema correctly

Before you start

• Genuine buyer questions and answers
• Access to the page template

The steps

1. 1

   Step 1: Write the questions

   Real ones you get asked. Do not invent questions to justify markup.

2. 2

   Step 2: Publish them visibly

   The user must be able to read every question and answer on the page. This is not optional.

3. 3

   Step 3: Generate the markup from the same source

   So the markup and the visible text cannot drift apart when one is edited.

4. 4

   Step 4: Use FAQPage with Question and Answer nodes

   name for the question, acceptedAnswer.text for the answer.

5. 5

   Step 5: Validate

   Rich Results Test will report FAQ as valid but ineligible for most sites. That is expected.

6. 6

   Step 6: Check the rendered page

   Confirm every marked-up question appears in the visible HTML.

Why ship it with no rich result

Question-and-answer pairs are the cleanest extractable format there is, and answer engines parse structured data in preference to inferring from prose. Ship it for that, and treat any future Google feature as a bonus.

The violation that is easy to commit accidentally

FAQ data living in a file that outgrows the template rendering it — so twelve questions are marked up and eight are displayed. Generating both from one source is the structural fix.

How many questions to mark up

All of them, provided every one is visible on the page. There is no threshold that improves anything and no penalty for a long list, but there is a real cost to marking up questions nobody asks. The right number is however many genuine questions you receive about that specific page, which for a service page is usually between four and eight and for a product page is whatever your support inbox repeats most.

The background behind this

Answer Engine Optimization: writing the passage that gets quoted covers the reasoning in about 3 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.

Who wrote this

Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada, Ireland and Pakistan. These procedures are the ones I run on client work, written down rather than invented — including the ones where the honest answer is that the fix is not available on your current hosting.