Your FAQ page is already written, in your WhatsApp chats.

Open the FAQ page on most small business websites and the first question is “What is our company?” The second is “Why choose us?” The third is “What makes us different?” Nobody has ever typed any of these into a WhatsApp chat. They are questions a business asks itself in a meeting, written down so the answers can say quality and trust one more time.

Meanwhile the questions customers do ask are sitting in somebody's phone. Do you deliver to Gandhinagar. Is there parking. Can I pay in two parts. What if the size is wrong. Those questions are the FAQ page, and most businesses already have every one of them in writing.

Where the real questions are

You do not need a survey. You need a week of looking at what is already there:

• The WhatsApp chat. Scroll back through a month of customer messages and copy every question into one document, in the customer's own words.
• Whoever answers the phone. Ask the receptionist, the store manager or the person on the sales line which five questions they answer every day. They will know without thinking, and they will be relieved someone asked.
• Your Google listing. The questions people post on your profile, and the doubts they mention in reviews. We wrote about the paragraph on that listing; the questions under it are just as useful.
• The last five minutes of a sales call. Whatever a prospect asks just before they decide belongs near the top.

Then count. The question that turns up twenty times goes first. The one that turned up once, from a customer who also asked whether you were hiring, can stay out.

Price goes first

In almost every list, one question wins by a distance: how much does it cost. It is also the question most FAQ pages leave out, or answer with “Prices vary depending on your requirements. Please contact us for a quote.”

That answer tells the reader two things: there is a number, and you would rather they didn't know it yet. Some of them will call. More of them will open the next tab.

If you cannot give one price, give a range and say what moves it. A physiotherapy clinic can give the price of a first assessment, the price of each session after it, and how many sessions a typical knee needs. That is enough for a reader to decide whether to call, which is all the page has to do. Our own service pages each end with a short list headed “Questions people ask first”, and on the website content page the first question is what a page costs. The answer starts with a number.

Answer in the first line

An FAQ answer has one job: to let the reader stop reading. So the first words of the answer should be the answer.

Take “Do you deliver on Sundays?” One version begins: “Customer convenience is at the heart of everything we do, and our delivery team works hard to…” The other begins: “Yes, within Ahmedabad, between 10 and 2. Orders placed after 8 pm on Saturday go out on Monday.” The second one is shorter and it is the only one that answers.

Yes, no, a number, a day, a place. Then the condition, if there is one. Then stop. If an answer needs more than three sentences, it probably needs its own page, and the FAQ can link to it.

The first words of an answer should be the answer.

Keep their words

Write the question the way the customer asks it, not the way your brochure would. “Is there parking?” beats “What are the parking facilities available at our premises?” every time. A reader scanning the page is looking for their own words. If they want to send something back, they are looking for the word return, and they will scroll straight past “exchange and refund policy”.

Then tidy the grammar and stop. The aim is something a customer could have typed, with the typos taken out.

Ask the questions they are too polite to ask

Some of the most useful questions are the doubts people keep to themselves. Will you still pick up the phone after I've paid? What if my child stops enjoying the class after two weeks? Is a small order worth your time? If you know a doubt that stops people buying, ask it on their behalf and answer it straight. It is the closest a web page gets to a salesperson who listens.

And leave out three kinds of question: a boast dressed as a question (“Why are we Gujarat's most trusted name?”), anything already in large type on the page above, and anything only one person has ever asked.

Put the answers where the doubt is

An FAQ page on its own, three clicks deep, gets read by very few people. Put the three or four questions that matter most on the page where the doubt comes up: the price question on the services page, the delivery question beside the order button, the “who will I actually speak to” question on the About page. A full FAQ page can hold the rest.

Then keep it alive. When a new question turns up three times in a month, it goes on the list. When an answer changes, the page changes the same day. A stale FAQ is worse than none, because it is a promise in writing that you no longer keep.

So this week, ask whoever answers your phone for the five questions they hear most, and check how many of them your website answers in its first line. Every one it misses is a line of your FAQ page, already asked and waiting to be typed up.