Search engines and your help centre

Your help centre is a public website. Search engines can find it, and a good help centre answers people who never visit your product at all.

It's set up already

Published articles are public pages with real URLs, a sitemap listing them, and a robots file permitting indexing. Nothing to switch on.

Drafts are not published pages, so they're never indexed.

Step-by-step guides get richer results

If your article's sections are named Step 1 —, Step 2 — and so on, HeyThula publishes structured data describing it as a how-to guide. Search engines can then show the steps directly in results, which takes up more space and earns more clicks.

Two things to get right:

• At least two steps. One isn't a guide, and nothing is published for it.

• Put the substance in the first paragraph under each step heading. That paragraph is what gets used, so a heading followed straight by a list gives the search engine nothing to show.

Your subtitle becomes the guide's description, which is another reason to write one.

Renaming is safe

Change your help centre address and the old one permanently redirects. Search engines understand that kind of redirect and carry your ranking across rather than starting again.

The same holds for articles: an article's address is fixed at first publish and doesn't change when you rename it. See Your public help centre address.

Writing for people works for search

The advice is the same as everywhere else here: one subject per article, answer near the top, title in your customers' words, write the subtitle.

Those aren't search tricks — they're what makes an article good, and search engines are increasingly hard to fool into preferring anything else.