Mehdi Hussen October 5, 2020 A knowledgebase is crucial for the growth strategy of your company, as it helps you to maintain constant communication with your customers whenever they need help. Having an optimized knowledge base can have several benefits, including driving more traffic to your website.
When your customers have easy access to instant help and accurate answers to their questions about your product right there on your website, you’re more likely to keep them happy. Happier customers also purchase more and are more likely to become the ambassadors of your brand, so by improving your knowledge base, you’re increasing product adoption.
An optimized knowledge base improves user experience and is more likely to grow your audience.
In this post, we will show you the best ways to optimize your knowledge base so that it brings more traffic to your website and helps you grow your company.
1. Start with optimizing your knowledge base content for SEO
There is no doubt that SEO is essential for your knowledge management in the same way as it is essential for your website. The best way to get more website visitors is by writing and organizing your content to rank high in search results. If your company’s knowledge base can be easily found through Google, you are more likely to draw the attention of your customers, as well as new prospects.
If you have a good knowledge base, you can easily drive more traffic to your website, attract more people into your sales funnel, and boost conversions. When optimizing your knowledge base for search engines, there are several tactics you should consider. Some of them include:
Some of them include
- Keyword optimization – By targeting the right keywords, you can make your knowledge base more visible online and puts you exactly where your customers are looking for a solution.
- Metadata optimization – Make sure you use the keyword phrases in your URLs, meta descriptions, titles, and alt attributes.
- An XML sitemap – This allows search engines to easily rank pages from your website on Google.
- Canonical links – They help you to easily avoid duplicate content and save you from getting penalized by Google.
Also, do not forget to optimize your knowledge base for all devices. If your website is (and it should be) available on mobile devices, your knowledge base should not be different, as this will allow you to reach a wider audience.
2. Ensure that your knowledge base runs fast
These days, the page load speed is very important for consumers. The faster your website loads, the more satisfied your customers will be with the experience. If your page does not load quickly enough, visitors and customers will leave the site and try and find the answer to their question somewhere else, potentially on a competitor’s website.
To evaluate the speed of your website, you can use a tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights, which will allow you to easily see how well your knowledge base performs.
Here are some of Google’s recommendations to help you increase page speed and improve customer experience:
- Reduce your server response time to under 200ms
- Enable and test gzip compression support on your web server
- Reduce redirects
- Minify your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript resources
- Optimize images
Google bases these recommendations to declutter and better organize your website. By getting rid of large images on your knowledge base, removing useless data in your HTML and CSS files, useless scripts and components, you will have a faster website.
3. Only publish relevant content in your knowledge base
This may sound logical or even cliche, but the phrase “content is king” is true. It not only applies to your marketing but your knowledge base as well.
How so?
Well, by publishing excellent and educational content that brings value to your customers and prospects will both capture and retain their attention for longer. This is an essential goal in a knowledge base that has the primary attention to provide quick and effective answers.
Here is how the content in your knowledge base should be:
- Relevant – Your posts should deal with one problem at a time, starting with your customers’ most common questions. Make sure you stick to the point when writing articles and ensure that the articles you write offer information and guidance to the people reading it.
- Accurate – Almost all people that visit your knowledge base is to get support and they do not want to waste time guessing how much of your info is up-to-date.
- Easy to read – People usually skim texts on the internet. Studies show that most read an average of 20 percent of a web page. Most do not have the time to read on and on, so you need to ensure to use titles, subtitles, and bold text to make it easy for people to find the information they need.
- Visuals – By adding screenshots, videos, infographics, and illustrations to support your content, you will make it even easier for your visitors to get the support they are looking for.
By making the information as easy to follow and understand, the people reading your help articles will share it with other people that have similar issues, which all leads to more traffic and potential growth of your business.
4. Have a great search engine inside your knowledge base
An effective search engine can significantly improve the user experience of your knowledge base and help you get more visitors. Make sure that you build an impressive search bar that people can clearly see and easily use.
Take a look at your analytics and find the keywords people are searching for in your knowledge base. With that info in hand, optimize your knowledge base content so that it is relevant to what they are searching for and show relevant results first.
5. Optimize the structure of your knowledge base
If you want to have a successful self-service knowledge base that will bring you lots of website visitors and help you grow your company, it needs to have some structure.
When people visit a knowledge base, they usually look for well thought out and informative articles. However, just having great help articles is not enough. You also need an easy way to navigate the knowledge base and find those articles.
To do this, you can organize your knowledge base article either by purpose or by topic. This means that posts that deal with similar issues should be grouped so that visitors can quickly find them.
People that are visiting your knowledge base simply do not have the time to read pages and pages of your knowledge base until they find the right article. They need a solution right now, and your knowledge base should give them that.
Failing to do so will likely lead to a poor user and customer experience which could lead to business loss.
You can also use suggestions in your search engine to help your visitors find a solution to the most common problems on the first try.
6. Allow your website visitors to get more help
While your knowledge base should include most, if not all, info that your customers need to solve their problems, sometimes they need an extra bit of help.
Make sure that all your articles include a section where visitors can get more information about that to make the most out of using your software.
By providing your customers with more valuable info, they are more likely to become advocates for your brand, which could lead to more growth for your company. Also, every page in your knowledge base should have your contact information in plain sight, so that people reading the articles can easily contact your customer support team for more help, if they need it. This leads to more credibility and trust.
This is more of a general customer support tip, but make sure that you have multiple ways of providing support for your customers. This could be social media, phone, email, or live chat directly on your website.
Final thoughts
If you want your knowledge base to bring your traffic and help your company grow, be prepared that it is an on-going process that will take consistent efforts from multiple people in your company. If you are ready to commit to that, then you will most likely be rewarded by increased traffic and growth of your company.
You have to constantly improve its content so that you can easily attract more visitors and have them keep coming back for more information.
Your knowledge base content should be valuable, shareable, and appealing to people and search engines. Your knowledge base itself should be fast and searchable. Organize your content in a way so that it is easy to navigate.
Use visual aids, information snapshots, and other types of valuable snippets to keep it relevant to your audience. Also, make sure that the people reading your knowledge base can easily find other ways to contact you, for those times when a knowledge base article is not enough.
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