Would you like to take your content marketing to the next level?
Would you like your potential customers to find all the answers on your site without ever having to leave?
Creating a comprehensive knowledge base will accomplish both of these goals and more:
- Establish your brand as a niche knowledge hub. Become THE resource!
- Get your site ranked for thousands of informational queries and diversify your rankings.
- Generate organic backlinks from other publishers (and improve your overall organic search visibility).
- Create sales enablement content which will help your team to close more sales without having to send leads to third-party sites.
Thinking like that might be a good idea? Then here’s how to create an ultimate knowledge graph.
Research Your Niche Questions
This is the most important step which will also allow you to better understand and relate to your target audience.
There are lots of tools allowing you to research questions that your potential customers are trying to answer. I will not try to list of all those but here are a few of my favorite ones:
Research question patterns with Text Optimizer
Text Optimizer is a semantic search platform that explores connections between words and concepts. The tool offers a handy question research feature allowing you to research popular questions around your target query:
See what Google is capturing inside their People Also Ask boxes
Google has questions integrated within their search results in the form of so-called “People Also Ask” boxes.
Using these questions in your content strategy will also help you get featured for these queries, so you will likely see higher rankings.
Browse Quora
Quora is a great resource to discover live discussions around just about any topic. If you start contributing to those discussions, you will also start building your authority and maybe even get some traffic.
Find questions people type into Google’s search box
Answer The Public is a cool free tool generating Google Suggest results (i.e. what Google shows when people start typing our target query) for your core term.
Another free tool from Google is called Search Console. If your site is already ranking for any keywords, you can find them within Google’s dashboard.
Yes, that’s a lot of tools to use but don’t wait until you have collected ALL the questions. Set up your knowledge base and gradually grow it into a huge resource.
Set up Your Knowledge Base
Thankfully, there are quite a few plugins for WordPress that let you make a glossary easily, and in the most organized way possible for user friendly convenience.
Acronym 2
Quickly provide a definition of common acronyms by replacing tags with this helpful plugin. You can have all of your information on a single page with this one, which makes it easier for users to figure out what is being offered without you having to manually replace each acronym.
Encyclopedia / Glossary / Wiki
Create an encyclopedia, lexicon, glossary, wiki, dictionary or knowledge base quickly, using this plugin. It is fully customizable, and you control the content. Use tags and categories to better classify your definitions, and link to pages.
Glossary
Create your glossary and immediately link to terms within your post. You will never have to send users to a third party for a definition again, keeping them instead within your post.
This is a cool glossary builder that will show the definition on the page when you hover over the glossary-defined word. The user can either remain in the post, or move over to the static glossary page for more information.
This list is not complete. Depending on how you envision your knowledge base to evolve, you may want to use complicated solutions (like themes that allow you to create a standalone wiki-style website). So take some time to pick the best platform and content management system before moving further.
Create Your Content Plan
Again, no need to plan far ahead. You’re going to deal with a lot of questions that need answering, so start gradually to avoid getting overwhelmed. Mind that:
- Some questions will require a separate article, others can be sections of one. It is your editorial decision
- Organize your questions into categories (Text Optimizer will be helpful for this task)
- In many cases, it will be a good idea to accompany your text article with a video. More and more people are searching Youtube to find answers, so you will be able to attract them to your site if you provide answers in a video format. Luckily, there’s an easy way to turn text content into videos with tools like Fastreel.
Set up Your Conversion Channels
While your knowledge panel will likely result in lots of indirect benefits like more traffic and brand recognizability, it is a good idea to make it part of your sales funnel to let it directly impact your bottom line.
How will my site user continue their journey through my site once they land here?
This is the question you need to be asking yourself every time you are publishing a new article within your knowledge panel.
To encourage your users to keep using your site, come up with contextual calls-to-action to smart engagement methods. These can be anything from a soft call-to-action inviting your readers to check out your product (as an answer to a described question) to a lead generation form that lets them download a related whitepaper or a more detailed tutorial.
To give you a good example of that in action, here’s an article over at Hubspot integrating all kinds of contextual CTAs in a contextual way.
Play with different on-page engagement methods, including conversational forms, lead generation assessments and web push notifications:
Keep an eye on all of these CTAs and conversion paths using Finteza, a web analytics platform with a huge focus on conversion tracking. The platform allows you to analyze, compare and A/B test all your conversion channels:
Conclusion
Building a truly useful knowledge base is an on-going effort. There’s hardly a niche that you can ever explain in full. You will keep discovering new questions to cover and new concepts to explain. But it is a fruitful effort on so many levels that it is definitely worth the time you invest in the project. Good luck!
