Frequently Asked Questions About Localizing Frequently Asked Questions

They have become a staple of most websites aimed at people, be they users, customers, clients, travellers or any other type of visitor: frequently asked questions. Regardless of what you do, if you have an audience, chances are you will start receiving questions and some of those will be asked repeatedly. The FAQ page or section has proven a particularly effective solution to tackle that challenge: many people find the answer to their questions here, typically offering a quick and simple resolution to their quest, while a good FAQ also greatly reduces the workload for customer support agents who would otherwise spend a lot of time repeatedly answering the same questions.

We hope this FAQ will not only answer some of your questions, but also inspire you to think about your own experiences with FAQs and customer support more broadly. And in case this FAQ raises new questions that are not already covered in this document, please feel free to get in touch: we are always happy to discuss these questions with you. With any luck, we can even find ways to help you help your audience even better!

An FAQ is a collection of frequently asked questions about your product or service, plus relevant answers provided by you. The FAQ page is one of those must-have sections for any business website, like the Contact and Privacy Policy page. It allows you to provide extra information about your business and improve the customer experience and customer satisfaction rating.

Best practices for FAQs include writing short, structured and SEO-friendly content. Customers will be looking for quick and easy solutions, so compose clear and concise answers, and add internal links where relevant. Organize your questions into different categories to make it easier for users to navigate your FAQ. Also consider optimizing your FAQ content for keywords your customers are searching for to boost your organic search ranking.

The obvious answer: questions that are frequently asked. More to the point, the best questions to include in an FAQ are those that your support staff gets often, but are easy to resolve without any external help. Customer questions can be broadly divided into three groups: problems that require actual assistance, questions about how things work and problems that people can solve themselves. The last two groups are prime candidates for inclusion in an FAQ, freeing up support staff time to focus on the problems of the first group.

To answer frequently asked questions about your business, obviously. No matter how clearly you describe your product or service offering, customers will always have questions. They might be able to find answers by browsing through various pages of your website, but who has time for that? By compiling common questions and answers on a central location, you can make the lives of your customers a little easier.

Absolutely! You save money on customer support since your agents won’t have to repeatedly answer the same questions and you can boost organic traffic to your website by answering questions people are searching for online, to name a few. A well-written FAQ page with relevant CTAs can even generate extra conversions. Let’s say potential customers frequently ask us if we have experience translating apps. We could include this question in our FAQ and simply answer “Yes”. Or we could direct customers to our page about software and app translation and encourage them to contact us or request a quote.

For the same reasons you decided to localize your website in the first place. It’s all about improving those numbers. Online customers prefer content in their own language, and this goes beyond just your UI and product descriptions. 75% of consumers are more likely to become repeat customers if support is available in their language.

A great start would be to look at the list of languages you serve your website in. Ideally, you want to offer your FAQ in every language you offer your website content in, as that is likely to align with the languages spoken by your target audiences. However, if your customer database shows that some languages are much more popular than others, you could consider redirecting customers using less popular languages to, for instance, your English FAQ.

Not so fast, there. It turns out that some countries are multilingual, with different parts of the population preferring different languages. That’s why it is important to do some research into your customers’ preferences and then base your language options on that information, rather than simply looking at billing locations.

Good for you, getting ahead of the localization game! While some countries use multiple languages, things are sometimes complicated further by languages being used in multiple countries. If you are getting these questions, this means that you might want to consider offering your website visitors a choice for both language and location. Did you ever notice URL’s with bits like ‘/en-us/’ or ‘/pt-br/’? Those are language/country codes tailoring website content to user preferences (English in the US and Portuguese in Brazil, respectively). That way, you can offer your customers an even better, more effortless shopping experience, as well as FAQ content that matches their local situation, helping people help themselves!

We won’t bore you with the details of the specialized translation software we use and how we find the most qualified translators for every job. If you provide us your content, the languages you want us to translate into and any reference material (previously translated content, information about your product or service, terminology preferences, etc), we can deliver your translated FAQs in a suitable format. Plus, we can save your translations for efficient multilingual FAQ maintenance in the future.

No, your FAQ should not be a static document. Re-read and re-write it whenever your processes change, you launch an update or expand your product offerings. It’s easy to make a real mess of your multilingual FAQ maintenance. Make sure to avoid copying and pasting, and sending individual updates to your translation provider. Just send the updated FAQ in its entirety: our software can detect the changes and we won’t make you pay for the unmodified content, since we stored those original translations.

You can, but we don’t recommend it. We understand large amounts of content and translation budgets don’t always mix well, but the key is to allocate your budget to your most valuable pages. The FAQ page, which has the potential to reduce customer support costs and drive organic traffic and conversions at the same time, is one of them. On the other hand, your enormous Help database could be a great candidate for machine translation post-edited by a professional linguist.

Scriptware is a professional translation services provider with an in-house team in Haarlem, the Netherlands, and a global network of experienced linguists. We provide high-quality translations for a range of industries, combining the latest tools and technologies with human creativity and expertise.

Well, not just FAQs, but we have translated a great deal of them. We know what to look out for and utilize our proven workflows to make your life a little easier. You can trust us to deliver accurate FAQ translations to support your international customers.

Feel free to contact us if you need more information or would like to schedule a chat. Or send us an email with your content and target language(s) to receive a free quote.