SEO Matters When You’re Publishing Documentation
It is now commonly accepted that Search Engine Optimization is important when you’re publishing online. After all, if a search engine doesn’t index your content well then the vast majority of people will never see it. Search engines like Google and Bing are the gateway to the web, which is why I find it so surprising that much of the documentation content put online completely ignores basic SEO principles.
Your documentation is a collection of answers to customer questions, and generally, customers have been trained to search before looking, meaning they likely won’t visit your support or documentation site before asking one of the major search engines their question.
Studies have shown that users click on the top three links on search engine results pages 80% of the time and that users spend nearly 70% of their time reading the content on those pages. When a customer has a problem and finds themselves needing an answer to get out of a jam they will look to Google for help.
Remember that you want your company’s content to be seen as authoritative. You want to control and guide your customer’s experience, and the best way to do that is to ensure that they see your words, videos, and messages first. The easiest, most effective, and honest way to do this is by providing high quality content. Not doing this means that other people participating in the broader, untethered community (say, asking a question in Yahoo! Answers) might have the first word when your customers have a problem.
If your content isn’t authoritative and customers don’t find it first then you run the risk of allowing your customer in need to not have a positive experience. Frustrated users are bad, especially when they use the internet to tell everyone else how frustrated they are.
A Simple Case Study
Let’s look at a real world example. Skype is a company that provides Internet-based phone calls. They are wildly successful and a rather cutting edge company. Their support site is one of the better that I’ve seen. It is direct, to the point, has a pleasing experience, and provides intelligent results. Skype also does a decent job of ensuring that the content from their support site has decent SEO. For example, their URLs are semantic and pretty, no “topicId=731254″ here. That’s why this example is so important, because even a company that values customer support as highly as Skype can still get it wrong.
Assume you are a Skype customer and you’ve lost your password. You’re trying to figure out how to retrieve or reset it so you go to Google and search for ’skype lost password’. This is what you’d see:
In my book that’s a win. The first link is the exact help topic that you need and it contains the exact answer to your question. In your mind the Skype support site is now authoritative for this question and answer and the customer experience is great because you are not fighting to find the right answer. According to Google’s Keyword Tool there are about 400 searches for this keyword each month. Not bad, 400 users sent to the right place and given exactly what they wanted.
What if instead of searching for “skype lost password” I decided to search for what I wanted to do, “skype retrieve password”. These are the results that Google would give you:
The first two links go to Yahoo! Answers and the third link is the actual help topic with the answer, the one that was first in the results in our first query. The first problem is simple, there are a large percentage of users who will not go directly to where the answer is. Instead they will be sent to a question in Yahoo! Answers. Hey, no big deal, right? Wrong. The “answer” provided on the Yahoo page is incorrect. It links to the wrong place in the Skype support center, and instead of sending you to the answer it goes to the Skype support center’s homepage. This is by no means catastrophic, but as a customer you’re starting to get frustrated. Luckily Skype’s support center is modern and makes it easy for the customer to find what they want–the first topic under “Popular Queries” is a link to the right topic in the documentation; unfortunately, Skype is the exception not the norm.
What’s the impact, in terms of numbers here? Not bad, about 300 people search for “skype retrieve password” each month. Going from the statistics in the report linked above, that means about 210 people went down the wrong path through Yahoo! Answers rather than directly to the correct information on Skype’s site.
Well here’s where the wheels go off the bus. Suppose instead you simply search for “skype password”. There are about 40,000 searches each month for this term. It’s not clear from the search exactly what the person is trying to achieve, but there aren’t very many things one might be able to do with a password. Let’s assume 50% are trying to fix a lost password either by resetting or retrieving it. That’s 20,000 searches by people looking for this topic in the Skype documentation. This is what Google would give them:
No where on the first page is any link to Skype’s documentation. The first link is to Skype’s forum–that’s good–but unfortunately the content on the page is totally wrong. No help for the random user looking to retrieve their password. There is a link within the forum post to a place where you can ask Skype for help by opening a ticket, but unfortunately this link is also broken (like in the forum post from the previous search) and sends the user to the completely wrong place. To make matters worse there are links to unauthorized tools and users complaining about the password policy. Certainly you can’t control what other people say about you on the Internet, but if the Skype documentation topic with the answer was first in the results, then the click statistics would imply that any user looking for help wouldn’t even see those pages.
Remember, we are assuming that there are about 20,000 searches that end up in this dead end each month. That is unfortunate for the user, and damaging to the customer experience of Skype. Equally disappointing is that there is no excuse for this to be happening.
What Should Skype Do?
1. Optimize their most popular topics for more effective SEO. Skype already knows what topics are popular–they show them on the Skype support homepage. By investing a little time and energy into those topics they can ensure that users land on the right topic regardless of whether they search for “skype lost password” or “skype password”.
2. Manage stale content. Ideally stale content wouldn’t be a problem because your content, the most authoritative content, would be first in the search engine results. However, sometimes that isn’t possible. In the case of the Yahoo! Answers skype could easily leave an answer of their own that is more appropriate and linked to the correct page. Further, their own forums are providing incorrect answers. They should edit those forum posts to ensure that users reading them also know where the right answer is in the official Skype documentation.
Of course, Skype has a great starting point. They already have a nicely designed, full featured, and probably custom built help center. They don’t force users to make decisions about where to find an answer (Is it a knowledge base article? Is it a forum post? Etc.). Instead they place search front and center, giving the user an easy way to get what they need. Most companies don’t even have this so they find it overwhelming to think about the issues discussed in this post. Thankfully, there’s a company out there trying to make it easy for you to get all the great benefits of a Skype-like support center.
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