Improving click-through rates are crucial to gaining traffic AND improving SERP rankings. In fact, it’s one of many key objectives that guide our SEO Product Roadmap.
The original inspiration
During my research, I found that Yelp does a very good job with their FAQs, particularly with how they had a bespoke CTA for each answer that’s linked to a corresponding resource/page. This was a step above the regular implementation of just adding links to specific anchor texts around the answer body of FAQs.
My hypotheses were that:
- Links strategically placed in a CTA would outperform links elsewhere i.e keyword-optimized anchor texts in the answer
- CTAs that relate to the query like Find flight deals on a “What’s the cheapest flight to X?” question would outperform general CTAs e.g Learn more
Building the foundation
Links were added to the website frontend regularly as with any HTML links, and we built a simple scalable way to correctly include them in the JSON data for the FAQ Schema Markup. Daniel Cheung does a great job explaining the nuance in this article.
To reduce the risk of duplicate content, I implemented a CTA pool/library. For each category, there would be at least 3-5 different CTA variations, plus a fallback option at all times in case submitted FAQ content miss a specified CTA.
I had also wanted a system in place so that if we wished to test different CTA texts we would have an easy way to toggle Hot Cues dynamically or switch our variations from a central place. Mantas, one of our team’s engineers, helped me build an infrastructure around this need (which is awesome but I don’t understand how it works under the hood haha).
Outcome and learnings
As standard practice, I only rolled this out to a small group of pages within the Rental Cars vertical of one brand we had owned. I ran a small A/B experiment with two clusters of landing pages for about a month, with one set having the full treatment (links in FAQ on the page and in the Schema) and one without. Given certain constraints at the time, I couldn’t run the test on a larger sample to find a statistically significant result to inform my decision. I cannot share the results of the test for confidentiality, but I did receive feedback from my team that the feature was a good UX add and that it unlikely would hurt traffic/revenue. We also saw that many pages post-change showed links in the FAQ rich results successfully on SERPs at scale so I can confirm our implementation was successful.
Today, many pages in the KAYAK Portfolio still employ CTA links in FAQ answers on the frontend, with each CTA being unique and relevant to the query itself.
Update: Unfortunately, FAQ rich results no longer exist on Google SERPs since May 2025. But I believe the project served its purpose as a reminder to our PM team to always connect our content and features with clear, relevant actions for the user.