Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Team or higher, Knowledge Professional or higher |
| Access | Admin |
Most people reach a help centre from a search engine rather than from your website. A good deal of the work is already done for you: the sitemap and the meta descriptions are automatic, and the first 140 characters of an article become its description in search results. What is left is a small number of decisions that matter a lot.
What Zendesk does for you
| XML sitemap | Automatic, at /hc/sitemap.xml on your help centre, updated every two hours with new content. Not available on Suite Team. |
| Meta descriptions | Automatic, from the first 140 characters of an article or post. For categories and sections, from the description you wrote. |
| Canonical URL tags | Used to tell search engines which address is the real one, so duplicate content stays out of the index. |
| Stable URLs | An article's address does not break when you change its title. |
| Language tags | Every page carries an hreflang tag, so a search engine knows which language it is looking at and can serve the right one. It is why the language switcher does not confuse crawlers. |
Register the sitemap in Google Search Console once. That is the difference between new articles being found in days and being found eventually.
1. It has to be public
Content behind a sign-in is not indexed, and the sitemap is not generated at all if the help centre requires sign-in. That one setting decides your reach: requiring sign-in on a customer help centre costs you most of its reach, and it removes the mechanism that would have got you found.
2. Titles as questions
The title is the most prominent thing in a search result, and people search in their own words. "Why is my order late?" matches what somebody types; "Delivery exception handling" does not. This is the same habit that makes your internal search work, which is convenient.
3. The first 140 characters are the pitch
They become the description underneath your title in the results, automatically. An article that opens with three paragraphs of context shows context where the answer should be, and readers decide from that snippet whether to click.
The same applies to categories and sections, where the description field you filled in is what gets used. That is a second reason to write it beyond helping whoever files an article.
4. Your own domain
Host mapping puts the content on your domain, so its value accrues to you rather than to a Zendesk subdomain, and Google sees the articles on the same domain as your main site. Do it before you publish, because changing it later means every ranking starts again.
5. One question per article
An article covering five things ranks for none of them clearly. Split, and link between them.
6. Translate the ones that matter
Because of those language tags, a Dutch customer searching in Dutch can be served the Dutch version rather than the English one. That only works where the translation exists. So translating your most searched articles is not a courtesy, it is the difference between being found and being scrolled past, and it is worth doing for the twenty that carry the traffic before the two hundred that do not.
What not to bother with
Keyword stuffing, and the URL structure, which you cannot change anyway. Write clearly for a person with a problem, fill in the first sentence properly, and the rest follows.
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