Help article / Knowledge base SEO consideration
-
Hi everyone,
I am in the process of building the knowledge base for our SaaS product and I am afraid it could impact us negatively on the SEO side because of:
- Thin content on pages containing short answers to specific questions
- Keyword cannibalisation between some of our blog articles and the knowledge base articles
I didn't find much on the impact of knowledge bases on SEO when I searched on Google. So I'm hoping we can use this thread to share a few thoughts and best practices on this topic.
Below is a bit more details on the issues I face, any tips on how to address them would be most welcome.
1. Thin content:
Some articles will have thin content by design: the H1 will be a specific question and there will be only 2 or 3 lines of text answering it in the article.
I think creating a dedicated article per question is better than grouping 20 questions on one article from a UX point of view, because this will enable us to direct users more quickly to the answer when they use the live search function inside the software (help widget) or on the knowledge base (saves them the need to scrolling a long article to find the answer).
Now the issue is that this will result in lots of pages with thin content.
A workaround could be to have both a detailed FAQ style page with all the questions and answers, and individual articles for each question on top of that. The FAQ style page could be indexed in Google while the individual articles would have either a noIndex directive or a rel canonical to the FAQ style page.
Have any of you faced similar issues when setting-up your knowledge base? Which approach would you recommend?
2.Keyword cannibalisation:
There will be, to some extend, a level of keyword cannibalisation between our blog articles (which rank well) and some of the knowledge base articles.
While we want both types of articles to appear in search, we don't want the "How to do XYZ" blog article containing practical tips to compete with the "How to do XYZ in the software" knowledge base article.
Do you have any advice on how to achieve that?
Having a specific Schema.org (or equivalent) type of markup to differentiate between the 2 types of articles would have been ideal but I couldn't find anything relating to help articles specifically when I searched.
-
Hi Guillaume
I would use the questions / answers you have as a chance to build out robust help and support sections for your products. Not only will this help you from a search standpoint with long tail queries, but it will also help you from a user standpoint as they will have a point of reference to help them with issues, answer questions as they decide if they want to buy your product, and also help with brand equity as you build more content that details answers more. What I would suggest, pay attention to the following:
- What questions are users asking?
- What issues are they having most with your product?
- How does your product compare against other products in the industry?
- What does yours do that competitor products don't?
- What new features are you adding?
- Are there any features that are underutilized by users?
- Are there any integrations you may have?
- What's the history of the product?
- What are competitors doing from a promotion standpoint that you're not?
When it comes to keyword cannibalization, that's not an issue. Two different pages can overlap in keywords so long as those pages have unique content regarding a particular keyword. To me, the two examples you listed above are two different ideas, as long as the general idea is different than the software idea and contains different steps.
What matters is that each page has it's own unique topic to the keyword and does not share content with another page. You'll find that as you are focused on a particular industry and product, that these things happen, but it's relatively easy to keep pages specific to an idea regarding a keyword. Also look for opportunities to repurpose content:
- Images
- Video
- Articles
- Gated content
- Etc.
Opportunities are limitless when it comes to content, even for a boring industry. It just takes time and digging. Let me know if this helps and if this answers your question. You have more than enough to make robust pages of content, and should have no idea to nodinex or canonicalize pages to one general FAQ page. Build more content, internally link in a smart way, and keep your eyes / ears peeled.
Good luck!
Patrick
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Follow/NoFollow?
I run Magento 2 and have two stores, one intended for the EU and one for the US. 99% of the products available appear on both stores, there is an automatic redirect in place to either store depending on your location. But I think Google is seeing these as duplicate products/stores. Should I add the Index,NoFollow tag to one of the two stores? My issue is that I want both stores to rank in their geographical locations and I am concerned that by adding the NoFollow tag is will stop that dead in its tracks for one location. Any advice would be helpful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots2 -
HELP!!! Steep Drop in Organic Traffic Starting 11/1/16
Starting November 1st, organic web traffic from Google dropped from an average of about 60 visits a day to about 5 per day. So we are more than 90% off!!!! At the end of September, we modified the header of the site to simplify it. We also added a snippet of code to each page to enable Zoho "Sales IQ" to work. Sales IQ enables us to track visitors and engage in chat sessions with them. Apart from that no changes have been made from the site. Any ideas as to what could have caused this drop in traffic? Was there a Google update at that time that could have caused the drop? Or could the recent site changes have caused this? I have attached a Google Webmasters Tool report showing the drop in traffic. I would very much appreciate some insight into this, as all organic traffic to our site has ceased. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan 9VNB1O50 -
Does anyone know of any tools that can help split up xml sitemap to make it more efficient and better for seo?
Hello All, We want to split up our Sitemap , currently it's almost 10K pages in one xml sitemap but we want to make it in smaller chunks splitting it by category or location or both. Ideally into 100 per sitemap is what I read is the best number to help improve indexation and seo ranking. Any thoughts on this ? Does anyone know or any good tools out there which can assist us in doing this ? Also another question I have is that should we put all of our products (1250) in one site map or should this also be split up in to say products for category etc etc ? thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Magento SEO firm
I'm looking for an SEO company that has substantial experience with the Magento shopping cart system. I've gone thru MOZ.com's Recommended List but I'm unsure of who specializes in Magento. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | UncleXYZ0 -
SEO and former site
Hi, my client had a site built and hosted with Avvo but we now shut it down and are using a new server. My concern is that Avvo's internal link structure is causing SEO issues. For example, his site will list for "San Diego Criminal Defense Attorney", but is then removed for no reason. Far worse, while he had the AVVO site, it would never rank at all on Google. He's got great content, and no spammy links. This is the site: www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com. Any thoughts of what I could do to disavow the AVVO pages that Google still has indexed? Does it matter? Or, is it simply a function of time? Thank you for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Article/ Blog Post submissions
Hello All, I'm looking to perform a 'Standard' guest blog post link building tactic, but i'm a little unsure as where to start. Does anybody have a list/ guide to websites that accept guest posts? Preferably ones that are useful for SEO purposes, I have been link building for about 3 months now, but to be honest, most of these links are NoFollow, which isn't too great! Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul_Tovey0 -
Accidental Noindex/Mis-Canonicalisation - Please help!
Hi everybody, I was hoping somebody might be able to help as this is an issue my team and I have never come across before. A client of ours recently migrated to a new site design. 301 redirects were properly implemented and the transition was fairly smooth. However, we realised soon after that a sub-section of pages had either one or both of the following errors: They featured a canonical tag pointing to the wrong page They featured the 'meta noindex' tag After realising this, both the canonicals and the noindex tags were immediately removed. However, Google crawled the site while these were in place and the pages subsequently dropped out of Google's index. We re-submitted the affected pages to Google's index and used WMT to 'Fetch' the pages as Google. We have also since 'allowed' the pages in the robots.txt file as an extra measure. We found that the pages which just had the noindex tag were immediately re-indexed, while the pages which featured the noindex tag and which were mis-canonicalised are still not being re-indexed. Can anyone think of a reason why this might be the case? One of the pages which featured both tags was one of our most important organic landing pages, so we're eager to resolve this. Any help or advice would be appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robmarsden0 -
Multiple blogs for seo
I have signed up for some rather expensive lawyer directories that have very high domain PR, 's of 6 or 7 . Some of these allow you to make blog posts or articles on their site which should be good for SEO because of the high domain PR. I understand that if I do a lot of posts on one of these blogs with links back to my site, I should rapidly reach the point of diminishing returns because they are all coming from the same domain. Therefore, I plan to mix up my blo posts betwee several of these sites and also rewrite them and post them on my own site's blog. My question is this, if I post on any of these sites and I link back to internal pages of my site, and not to the home page, does this offset the "diminishing returns" factor? Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | diogenes0