SEO Options for your Support Center and Knowledge Base Articles

Last Updated: April 4, 2021

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important for the success of any online business. Without a good SEO strategy for your business website pages, your search result ranking may drop. Eventually, you might miss a well-established internet presence.

Apart from a business’s website, the support center and knowledge base articles are additional content repositories that can help in increasing the business’s footprint on the internet. For them to appear high on the search engine result pages (SERPs) and to be easily locatable on the internet, the support center and articles have to be optimized. 

Why should your Support Center and Knowledge base need SEO?  

When your customers want to know more about a specific feature in your product, their first step is to “google” it. When a particular keyword is searched, Google lists thousands of helpful and relevant articles. 

Having an SEO optimized FAQ section on your support center is a great way to show online customers that you care about their experience. It not only helps your existing customers but also attract potential customers. You could write general articles or tutorials about your products or services. Somebody who does not know about your business before can discover that article, get to know about your company, and possibly become your customers down the lane.

How to SEO optimize your Knowledge base in HappyFox

The support center and knowledge base are an integral part of HappyFox Help Desk software. 

In HappyFox Help Desk you can improve discoverability of your home page, login page, and the new ticket page of your support center by,

  • Allowing search engines to index your support center pages
  • Generating a public sitemap to your support center 
  • Creating search engine friendly URLs
  • Providing an SEO Title
  • Adding a Meta Description
  • Adding Meta Keywords 

Allow Indexing your Support Center

If you want the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing to show relevant high quality content (knowledge base articles) to your customers, you can turn on or turn off the setting – Allow Search Engines to index your support centers in HappyFox Help Desk.

Depending on the setting, HappyFox will automatically add a meta tag (index or No-index) to the pages of your support center. A no-index tag means that that page will be ignored by the search engine web crawlers.

Pro Tip: Have internal links spread across your knowledge base article. Interlinking articles can boost your SEO. They connect your content and give search engines an idea of the structure of your website.

2. Generating a Public Sitemap to your Support Center

Sitemaps are a longstanding SEO strategy. You may have written and published articles under various categories and subcategories. The sitemap provides an easy way to know the hierarchy and relationship of your knowledge base articles.

They assist search engines instantly crawl through your help center articles. These crawlers read the pages and other information and create entries for the search engine index. This results in higher search rankings. As a result, your customers can get answers to their queries quickly. 

HappyFox Knowledge Base allows you to turn this setting On or Off. When you turn it On, an XML sitemap gets automatically created. The XML sitemaps are placed on the website’s root directory for easy access by the search engines. It helps the search engines to understand your support center’s structure. 

You can have a look at this article by Google to understand more about the importance of a sitemap. 

Pro Tip : You can turn on the sitemap setting when your support center
– Is large.
– Has a vast archive of content pages that are not interlinked.
– Is new and has only a few external links to it.
– Has a lot of rich media content (video, images, etc.)

4. Providing an SEO Title

The page title is an essential part of SEO optimization because it is read by search engine crawlers and seen by users searching the web. A good page title will clearly describe the content of your page in a reader-friendly way.

Article titles with proper keyword usage add relevance and help your customers locate the right knowledge base article from the support center. 

A well-constructed title will increase your likelihood of standing out in search results.

Pro Tip: Use the most important keywords used in the page’s body content. This tells the search engines that these words were selected for the <title> tag because they best define the overall contents of the page.

5. Adding a Meta Description

Meta descriptions provide a short definition of the contents of web pages. They are generally used on search engine results pages to display preview snippets for a page. The meta description is not factored into search engine rankings but greatly entice your customers to click on your support center articles. You can optimize it with relevant keywords and a strong call to action that will attract your customers.

Pro Tip: For every meta description you write, ask these two questions: “What is this page offering?” and “Why should I visit this page?” If you’re not answering them, rework the descriptions until you can.

6. Adding Meta Keywords

Meta Keywords are a type of meta tag that appears on your website’s HTML code. They inform the search engines what the topic of the page is and helps determine the page’s relevance to search queries.

Google no longer uses meta keywords for page ranking. Other search engines like Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex continue to use it to a certain extent in their page ranking algorithm.

Pro Tip: A best practice is to include misspellings in your meta tags. They may indicate to search engines that your page is relevant to the (misspelled) search query.

Bottom line

With SEO settings in HappyFox, optimize your support center pages. Help your customers find the right content and enable seamless navigation across your support center and knowledge base.
Get a one on one demo to know more about HappyFox Help Desk software.

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