Many websites – whether they be for non-profit brands or businesses – offer various forms of assistance to users and customers. The ability to quickly obtain answers and – if needed, assistance – can make the difference between a conversion or sale for you versus one for your competitor. All too many brands fail to properly satisfy their visitors’ needs by either not including help content or by implementing it improperly. With regards to SEO, help content can not only boost overall visibility for your brand in search, but will also be able to compete niche-wide when searchers try to find assistance for a particular task, product or service. Below, we’ll discuss how you can properly improve SEO functionality for this type of content and generate more authority with search engines and visitors alike.

Identify Top Performers

When deciding how best to optimize help content – or even create it – you’ll want to determine which pages and subjects on your site perform best with visitors. This can be done via the use of simple analytics; by determining which pages are the most popular, you’ll have the basis for which subjects need to be addressed. Pinging users with FAQs regarding these subjects will not only help satisfy their need for more information, but it will also complement any existing SEO efforts to improve rankings for these pages. With relatively little effort, this strategy will help increase overall satisfaction with the thoroughness of your content and amplify the number of pages on your site that rank well.

Increase Intra-Site Links

After your help content is public and thoroughly fleshed out, the need to put it in front of as many eyes as possible becomes the next objective. SEO enthusiasts already know that having a solid number of links between various pages on the site – outside of simple navigation menus – can improve overall performance in search. Because of this, it only makes sense to assess the content that you have referred to in your support sections and link to it from relevant pages on your website. As people contemplate questions or experience confusion, your support content will be right there in front of them, in the form of intuitive links on the pages where the most questions arise.

Provide Support Widgets

After improving overall help content and ensuring that it is linked in the proper places, you’ll want to go one step further by ensuring no one can possibly miss it. A wide variety of solutions exist to make this possible: from pop-up boxes that alert people to solutions for common questions to on-page support widgets that promise help is only one click away, pinging users with these reminders will ensure more clicks to this content. As more people investigate your help content, these pages’ authority in search will begin to rise. In addition, the reduction of bounce rates for visitors who arrived via SERPs ensures that your overall website will begin to feature more prominently in niche-related search results.