Help article / Knowledge base SEO consideration

[tbps]

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:

1. Thin content on pages containing short answers to specific questions
2. 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.

[PatrickDelehanty]

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