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How to Make the Search Engine Hate Your Knowledge Base

how to make your search engine hate your knowledge base

The reason why customers stop using a product or service is that they can’t access information right away or they end up with a low-key customer support service. For that purpose, it’s necessary that you create an online knowledge base that gives you a competitive advantage in your niche and helps you expand your customer base without the fear of having lost the existing customers.

People normally guide you to build a concrete knowledge base and find ways to establish a working relationship between a search engine and the knowledge base. However, this article is something different; it will outline all the ways through which a knowledge base contributes and how you can sabotage the perfect relationship it can have with the search engine!


P.S.: This article is produced in complete opposition with the ways you need to come up with to create an effective knowledge base that ranks well on search engines. Better take your cue because you’ve been warned!


What Can a Knowledge Base Do for You?

An online knowledge base is crucial for your SaaS business. Your knowledge base needs to be compiled with relevant information, which your customers can access instantly. The bigger the knowledge base, the broader will be your chances to get noticed. This self-help knowledge hub can give you a strategic advantage in the following ways:

  • It not only help your customers find answers but also help your employees find answers to their questions regarding company policies, knowledge structure, and any other question related to consumer service.
  • An automated knowledge base helps employees find their way around their tasks without incurring increased onboarding costs, and hence, enhancing the company’s overall productivity.
  • The knowledge shared within the system demands smooth flow and communication within the company, which makes it easier for different departments to collaborate with each other.
  • When the core of the knowledge sharing system strengthens, the base gets stronger and improves the customer support system, reducing the overall costs of offering help to your customers.
  • A broader knowledge base means higher customer satisfaction rates. When customers find their desired information, the probability of customer retention will increase.
  • With a properly organized knowledge base, the customers will receive immediate service, which means their wait-time will be reduced to a greater extent.
  • A regularly updated knowledge base contributes to higher SEO ranking based on its content relevance. It also leads to increased web traffic.

Ways to Make the Search Engine Hate Your Knowledge Base

Since so much importance is placed on the knowledge base, let’s now go through the ways you should choose when you’re opting for obscure ranking due to your tiff with the search engine. This way, your knowledge base not only retrogrades, but you also keep losing prospective customers. Without further ado, here are the best ironic ways as well as contrary practices:

1. Don’t Use Chatbots for Customer Support

Chatbots are a great way to engage your customers without wasting a fraction of time. These are the best 24/7 customer service agents and can help in generating customer tickets. But since you’re going to destroy your knowledge base, the best way is to either not use a chatbot or use the one that leaves your customers perplexed and waiting for the answers that don’t exist within your customer knowledge base!

chatbot

Contrary Solution: The best practice to keep an active interaction with your customers by employing bots that integrate easily in your knowledge base. If it’s an AI-programmed bot, you can let it suggest similar products and services, regulating the service within due time.

You can also use inspiration from various sources for an idea about how to simplify your knowledge base. Customers value the knowledge bases that are catered with relevant information and allows them the easiest access within the least time spent.

2. Never Update Your Knowledge Database

A knowledge base grows when you’re constantly regulating and sustaining it while updating your service or product. It will start to ward off customers when the information uploaded becomes obsolete or isn’t relevant to the product. To make matters even worse, the addition of dead-end links is also a factor that contributes to customer disinterest. Plus, you can also stop auditing the pages for why they’re visited the most.

Contrary Solution: To save your knowledge base from disappearing into the wilderness, keep regulating it on a daily basis. When you upgrade your product, make sure you regulate the information while you expand your knowledge base. Make sure you discard dated information and fix any inconsistencies that happen due to its replacement. When adding hyperlinks, don’t forget to add fresh, working links that are productive for your customers. Train your staff to keep updating the information on the knowledge base.

3. Confuse Your Customers with Complex Knowledge Base Layout

Design complex and incompatible menus toward your customers off. Create walls of texts to terrify them and include ambiguous information regarding your product. When you create a knowledge base loaded with complex information, the search engines already begin to hate you for the cluttered details. Your customers aren’t going to like what they see and neither would Google’s SEO.

Invest your time into thinking about all the ideas that can fill every space into your knowledge base. Complicate the organization of your content to test the patience of your customers because that is what they dislike.

Contrary Solution: The proper way of handling your knowledge base layout is to make it clear, concise, and easy to understand. All of the support as well as contact options should be present within clear view and must be organized in a clear pattern. The key here is to give your customers a non-confusing experience with less clutter. You can also work on easing the knowledge base readability by testing it out on various devices. 

4. Be Inconsistent

Inconsistency is the key to drive your customers away from your company website. What triggers the customers is the ever-changing tone and formatting in your knowledge base. For instance, you’re wasting time uploading multiple articles on the topic that uses the same repetitive information. Since search engines prefer optimized content, the overlapping information will be automatically by cut each other off from appearing in the search results.

Contrary Solution: To avoid inconsistency in the content of your knowledge base, make sure the information you upload is created with a visual perspective. Start with basic information and expand on that. If your company is growing, your knowledge base needs to grow too – but with hierarchical knowledge developed in time.

5. Keep Using Jargons

The taste for using posh words and being verbose is something that lets most down. As a company with prospects for a rich knowledge base, you will have customers from all sorts of backgrounds with different levels of intelligence. If you won’t use simple language and keep loading your knowledge hub with jargons, a point would come where you won’t be able to understand the content yourself, which will ultimately weaken your customer base. Plus, keywords are the best friends of a search engine and their neglect will reduce your chances of appearing in a search list.

Contrary Solution: Your creative skills are realized when you have the ability to expand on complex subjects with a simple, understandable language. If you’re using complicated terms or jargons, makes sure you elaborate on that concept or provide a source that simplifies it for your customers. Use relevant keywords that are kept intact with the optimal keyword density.

6. Don’t Let Customers Find Service Options

Customers are always eager to dig deep into the knowledge base of a company. If the customers have to employ extra effort to find the support options they need immediately, you’ll end being a backup. Plus, you become more suspicious and lose your customers’ trust when you keep hiding from your customers. And in that case, your ranking in the search engine results goes down when you are reluctant of providing any contact information.

Contrary Solution: The only way to let the search engine and customers notice you is to open up and share your contact information with your customers. Moreover, when you include different methods of support and contact on your landing page, such as your tagged location on Google Maps, your contact number, your email address, and links to your social media pages, you not only increase your reach to your customers via the search engine results, but also grow the knowledge base to a greater extent.

7. Make Login Necessary for Everyone

Customers find it a hassle when accessing your knowledge base if it requires them to sign up or login with an account. Disrespect unintended, these people need ready-made information at their disposal due to which they might not be willing to spend the next 5 minutes, creating or resetting their password (in case they forget it).

knowledge base login page

Contrary Solution: Just make your knowledge base login-free, so that anyone can access any information they want. The login and password hassle only acts as a barrier for attaining necessary information. Helping your customers is what also helps your knowledge base thrive on the search engine. Just note that your customers and Google like free helpful stuff, and to accomplish that goal, read the first line of this paragraph again.

8. Give them an Information Overload

It’s obvious that you want to solve every problem, but the most restricting factor for the growth of your customer service base is prioritizing on quantity over quality. Just because you create an individual page for each problem doesn’t necessarily mean that your customers will find it convenient. Plus, information overload will probably overwhelm your prospects for having a better chance at search engine ranking.

Contrary Solution: First of all, understand how the search engine works. Devise a policy of ‘every information will be given on a need-to-know basis’ and align that strategy with every relevant product information. Prioritize quality over quantity as well as fix your technical issues before proceeding to information overload. Find out what drives the traffic to your pages and where do customers need help. Learn what you need to do in order to expand your customer base.

9. Set Your Knowledge Base and Forget It

You know that you need a knowledge base and you’ll try everything to make it. Since the requirements of a knowledge base are quite extensive, you can assign the responsibility of it to two or three employees and forget it. The impact would be a massive one – from the downside. Each employee would be doing their own side of the job where you won’t have the slightest idea of what’s going on in your knowledge base.

Contrary Solution: Even if you’re assigning the responsibility of your knowledge base to your employees, make sure you designate respective roles to them. But, you still render the responsibility to keep updated on how your knowledge base is progressing. Sure, some old links and content might be replaced by new information uploaded by your employees, but consider this phase as a process of growth. It’s a good thing that the overall company’s knowledge base will be managed in the long-term.

On-the-Contrary Conclusion

Creating a knowledge base isn’t less than a paradox if you aren’t doing it right. The main purpose of your knowledge base is to ease the customer service and expand it to rank up in the search engine. If you’re opting for a better search engine ranking, the best practice is to keep aware of the keyword usage by your customers and use those to expand your customer base. It will help you score a better ranking.

Make sure your customer base caters to all the queries and questions that your prospects are seeking. Optimize your webpages so that they are used and understood by customers from all cohorts. And last but not the least; keep updating your knowledge base to suit the trends in the latest search engine and SEO strategies. Hope it helps!

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About the author

Bryan Wills is a seasoned expert in knowledge management with over a decade of experience in the field. His expertise extends across various domains, including Security & Compliance, User Management, Knowledge Management, Software Documentation, and Customer Support. His writings not only reflect his deep understanding of these subjects but also offer practical solutions and strategies to help organizations enhance their knowledge management processes. Bryan’s work has been published in GetFeedback, CustomerThink, and Apruve.