If you publish technical documentation on the internet, this guidance is for you: Effective content strategy is grounded in search engine optimization (SEO) intelligence and techniques. Before I tell you what I mean by that, I’ll tell you why.

More than 50% of referrals are from search

BrightEdge, the SEO tools company, reports that more than 50% of site traffic comes from search, meaning it’s the single largest site traffic source and a high priority for content creators. Among the possible referrers to your docs — social media, direct links, and links from other sites — it will reach the most customers or potential customers.

Google is exceptionally good at determining search intent and finding content fast. Your site’s own search and navigation are unlikely to be as effective (although they are important to have). Therefore, curating how your content appears in search is essential. A marketing pal of mine says, “Search is your landing page.”

Search data is customer data

Your customers are speaking to you through your search data.

In search queries, customers tell you not only what they are looking for, but also what terms they use. Query strings also provide important information by the absence of terms: Do all or most reported queries for your content use your brand or other propriety terminology, such as feature names? If so, unless your product leads the industry with no major competition, you’re not using terminology your customers use.

Other search metrics, such as bounce rate, click-through rate (CTR), and page rank are also messages from your customers: Is the page intent clear? What interests them the most?

Listen to them.

Basic content strategy using SEO techniques

How to use SEO techniques and intelligence in your content strategy is a massive and broad-ranging topic. I’ll provide a high-level view here, and then follow up with details in subsequent posts.

• Write for the search page. To show up well in search, write page titles (the meta title tag), meta descriptions, and URLs that communicate intent, and then preview them.
• Write about a single intent for each doc page. Don’t write about multiple customer intents — or scenarios, if you prefer — on a single page. Focus on one customer intent, and walk your customer through it with subheadings and illustrations.
• Use the doc page structure effectively. Write a first paragraph that quickly states the page intent, scannable headings, descriptive link text, alt text for images, and so on.
• Learn the commonly-used terminology for your technology. Use Google searches and keyword research tools to educate yourself about the common terminology in your area. Don’t depend on your company’s proprietary terminology alone.
• Have empathy for your reader. Customers go to your docs to solve a problem quickly; they want to read just enough to get an answer. Get to the point and be done. Avoid warm-up text, unnecessary structural phrases, and digressing into explanations of concepts that could be provided elsewhere.

This list doesn’t contain all the SEO techniques you’ll ever use, but to succeed in search you must master these items first.

Finally, there are two other points following that a good content strategist needs to attend to:

• Plan a manageable content lifecycle with just enough documentation.
• Mind the entire web presence for your product’s instructional materials.

Plan for the content lifecycle and fewer docs

Plan content with its lifecycle in mind. If you work in an area of technology that is volatile, each update is likely to take more time than the first drafts of any doc. With this in mind, plan your content set carefully, write the minimum content needed, and then add content based on customer data.

Apply the 80/20 rule used in software development: Microsoft has reported that fixing the top 20% of bugs solved 80% of user issues in a system.

Similarly, consider that if you documented the top 20% of customer intents or scenarios, you’d likely cover 80% of user issues. Further, the last 20% of user issues often takes the greatest effort to document — yup, 80% of the effort. (See the “In software” section of Pareto principle in Wikipedia.) I’ve frequently seen quickly diminishing returns as content sets grow.

More content doesn’t mean more search presence. It can often mean you’re watering down rank of the 20% of customer intents that matter most. (More on that in a future post.)

Mind the things product partners publish, too

Finally, you need to pay attention to what internal partners publish about the product you document, such as tutorials on GitHub, websites the product team builds, marketing pages, and so on. These other web assets can contribute to or undercut the success of your docs. They will very likely compete for or water down documentation search rank.

Be a partner with marketing, the product team, and others by working with them to tell a simple, coherent product story. At minimum, collaborate to cross-link your content and avoid duplication.

If your product has content assets published on multiple sites, work with your partners to consolidate the content location, and then remove and, if possible, publish redirects from deprecated content.

By focusing the product story and consolidating content, you’ll improve the search rank of your content.

That’s it for now

If you aren’t yet doing the things in this article, it’s too early to think about more advanced SEO techniques like keyword strategy and optimization. They are more labor-intensive and won’t yield adequate results if the basics aren’t in place.

Categories: Content strategy