As a result of the above points, we can conclude that investing in knowledge base articles will surely result in success in the future. It will enhance customer satisfaction and provide better services at the same time.
5 Effective Tips For Knowledge Base Articles
Understanding how essential it is to have knowledge base articles on your website, the next concern is how to make these articles more effective? To help you out, here presenting the top effective tips for knowledge base articles. Let’s get started.
1️⃣ Don’t Assume Your Customer Knows Everything
If you are writing documentation articles, the first thing you should consider is that you shouldn’t assume your readers know everything about your products or services. Therefore, you should write each knowledge base article thoroughly. Assuming that the people who are reading your articles are total beginners, for example, is a good strategy for drafting your help desk articles. Don’t use advanced terminology and jargon for the basic documentation. The safest assumption is that customers will need guidance on each step.
You could, for instance, write how-to KB articles if you need to acknowledge readers about installing your product or plugin. Also, write down each step descriptively so that readers get a clear idea about what they have to do. If they need to get any additional third-party software or plugin, you should also mention that.
2️⃣ Provide Easy Scrolling With Anchor Links
As said earlier, you can’t assume that every step you have written in the knowledge base article is essential for your readers. They might need help in the third or last steps. So to improve your KB articles readability, you can add Table Of Content with anchor links.
This will also improve your site navigation as well. Another benefit is that if your reader wants to go back to previous steps they can easily do that by clicking on the Table Of Content anchors. Additionally, readers can easily skip past the information they do not need and jump right to the information they need.
Check out the example of using Table Of Content in a documentation article using BetterDocs documentation plugin.
3️⃣ Add Easy-To-Read Titles For KB Articles
In writing knowledge base articles, you should research what kinds of information your customers are looking for and give titles that reflect that. Usually, customers look for what kind of feature or service you are providing, how to use them, what to do when they get stuck, etc. Keeping this information in mind you should create them.
For instance, you provide WordPress plugins. So your titles should be; ‘How To Install The WordPress Plugin?’, ‘What Are The Basic Features’, ‘How To Get The Advanced Features’, etc.
4️⃣ Use Images, GIFs, & Videos In Necessary Steps
Whenever people look for answers or solutions, it’s getting easier to understand them if you could help to visualize them. Images, videos, GIFs are the best option to improve documentation articles’ readability. Moreover, adding images, GIFs, or other forms of interactive visualization will help readers understand your article better. As a result, your KB articles will get more engagement and rank higher in search results.
5️⃣ Organize Documentation Articles In Logical Order
The ultimate goal of managing documentation is to help your customers. It is not enough to write resourceful knowledge base articles; you need to present them in a way that makes them easy to comprehend and find. For that, you have to design your documentation articles in a logical order
So categorizing your KB articles will help you to give your knowledge base a more organized appearance. You should include categories, tags, keywords, etc. with every article in a knowledge base, and represent it in a way that shows the full life cycle of your product or service.
For example, if your product is a WordPress plugin, then the category appearance can be like this; Getting Started → Learning → Configuration → Troubleshooting, etc. Here we have added BetterDocs websites documentation pages category view.
More Tips To Keep In Mind While Writing Documentation Articles
As well as the above tips, there are more suggestions you can follow to improve your knowledge base articles. Here we have listed down more helpful tips to guide you for writing great documentation articles.
6️⃣ Avoid Using In-House Jargons In Documentation Articles
There is jargon used by the developers, designers, and other team members in your company to assist in team communication. But it’s not obvious that your customers are also familiar with them. That’s why you should create KB articles that are jargon-free and easy to understand. It is always best to provide a simpler explanation for any terminology you need to use in your documentation articles. It will help your customers better understand what you are selling or providing to them.
7️⃣ Reference Other Articles In Documentation Strategically
Once you begin managing your knowledge base articles, you will find yourself in a situation where one KB article depends on another. There is no point in repeating the same information twice, as it would lengthen your documentation as well as make it more difficult to locate actual data. You can strategically deal with this situation by linking other KB articles into one where it is needed. This will improve your KB articles’ readability and increase backlinking in your articles.
For instance, if in a process of configuration, if customers must follow other articles first, then you can represent them backlinking like this.
8️⃣ Work On Improving Knowledge Base Articles Readability
Must notify you that creating knowledge base documentation is not a one-time thing! The service you are providing or the product you are selling gets new changes often. So you have to update your knowledge base articles according to new changes. Unless you do that, your customers will not be able to find what they are looking for, resulting in a decrease in customer service.
You not only have to update your knowledge base articles for new updates. The documentation representing the pattern can also get backdated. In such cases, you must update them as well to meet customers’ needs.
Another advanced tip is to collect readers’ ratings and feelings about your documentation articles, whether they are finding them helpful or not. Using these resourceful analytics data, you can easily identify the areas for improvement and optimize your documentation articles. Here is an example to measure your knowledge base articles standard using BetterDocs knowledge base plugin.
Get An Advanced Knowledge Base Plugin For Managing Documentation
Following the above essential tips for knowledge base articles will surely make them great. But implementing all the suggestions manually is very difficult to keep track of all. Getting an advanced knowledge base plugin in your WordPress website will help you in automating your knowledge base article. And among many options, the most popular knowledge base plugin, BetterDocs will provide you with all the facilities you will need.
With this stunning knowledge base plugin, you can easily create a knowledge base on your website, write documentation articles, organize them by categories, add Table Of Content, and so on. Moreover, you can create Multiple Knowledge Bases for different products and services.
This knowledge base plugin advanced dashboard will help you to analyze every KB article’s performance thoroughly. You will also get Instant Answer chat bot, advanced search bar, option to feature Popular Docs, and the list can go on. With all its basic and premium features, BetterDocs knowledge base plugin is a complete solution for managing your knowledge base efficiently.