Setting up a knowledge base that has both public and private content

Not everyone realizes that it’s possible to have a knowledge base that has a mix of both public and private content. There are loads of situations where this setup can be super useful, though!

In this post, I discuss how you can build a knowledge base that has both public and private content. The example I’ll be using is a knowledge base for a software company, but this mixed audience approach could be useful for any type of knowledge base.

Why would I want a mix of public and private content?

You may want the public to see certain areas of your software’s help center, so they can get a clearer understanding of your product. Help Centers can be secret weapons in the SEO game, serving as a great marketing tool for your company. If you’d like to go deeper into how to improve your knowledge base’s SEO, check out Knowledge base SEO tips for those of us who hate SEO.

However, for proprietary reasons, you might not want to have all of your software documentation publicly accessible. Your competitors and/or AI might not have any business sniffing around there and learning the ins and outs of your product.

Additionally, you might want different segments of people to access different content. Many organizations opt to create separate knowledge bases for each of their audience segments. For example, a public knowledge base for anyone, a private knowledge base for paid customers, and a private knowledge base for their staff.

However, another option is to have a mixed audience knowledge base—one that serves different information to different readers.

In my software company example, you could have some information public, other information for paid customers, and other information that only your staff can access—all within the same knowledge base!

Having a knowledge base with both public and private content can often save costs by:

1. Paying for only one knowledge base instead of multiple.

2. Making it easier to maintain and administer your content, since it is all in one place.

3. Giving you unified search. In my example, this means that your support staff wouldn't have to search in multiple knowledge bases to find whatever information they're looking for.

How might I set this up?

The first step is to ensure that your knowledge base software allows you to have both public and private content. You can see which companies offer this feature with our free security-feature software comparison tool. 

Next, map out your organization's different audiences and which content would be most beneficial to each audience.

You can start by thinking about which content you might want to have public. Ask yourself:

• Does our software offer any features that our competitors don't offer?

• What do we want more people to know about our product?

• Are there specific SEO areas we want to see improve?

• What questions do potential customers often ask?

Consider first creating content around these topics and making it publicly accessible. For public content, you don’t always need to get into the nitty gritty details of your how your product's features work, but having basic help articles that outline what your product can do will likely help prospective customers when they're evaluating your product.

From there, you can begin creating your private content. For example, you could focus on content for your paying customers. Ask your support team to help with this. They will know which questions your customers most often need answers to. You can work on building out that content and having it accessible only to your paying customers.

What if I want to present different information to different logged-in readers?

You may want to segment content for different readers. For instance, you could have public content for SEO, content that's only visible to paid customers, and other content that's only visible to staff.

For staff, you can add content that will help them answer questions that customers can’t find answers to in your help center, such as troubleshooting processes, best practices, or other internal docs that shouldn’t be seen by your customers.

If one of your support staff needs to ask someone else on the team how to do something, then that is information that should be added to the internal knowledge base for your staff. Ask your support staff which questions their colleagues ask them repeatedly and start building out content from there.

Which features will be useful for my mixed audience knowledge base?

You might want to implement remote authentication or Single-Sign-On (SSO) so your customers will be automatically logged in to the private part of the help center via your own software. Not all knowledge base software offers SSO options—and those that do might charge extra for it—so that is definitely something to investigate when you're assessing which knowledge base software is right for your organization. With remote authentication or SSO, you can automatically assign customers and staff to the appropriate group(s), which will dictate which areas of your private knowledge base they'll be able to access.

Another feature to consider is author control (i.e. segmentation). Some knowledge base software allow you to segment out which content is visible/editable to different authors within the account. In other words, segmentation allows you to have different groups of authors with different content access and creation permissions in different areas of your knowledge base.

Depending on the knowledge base software you’re using, you may also be able to have a widget version of your knowledge base embedded directly into your software product, allowing your logged-in customers to access your knowledge base directly within the context of your software.

Conclusion

There are lots of different situations where a mixed audience knowledge base might be useful.

You can benefit from increased SEO while having full control on who can access different types of content within your knowledge base. Security and control are increasingly important, so it is definitely something you want to consider when you’re evaluating knowledge base software.

We have a free security feature comparison tool to help you find the right knowledge base software for your needs. Our comparison tool includes all of the features mentioned in this article + more!

Feel free to reach out to us at support@knowledgeowl.com if you have any questions about setting up your mixed audience knowledge base (or anything else). We would love to hear from you! Hoot! 🦉