Mastering KnowledgeOwl: Tips for Optimizing Your Documentation

Welcome back to the three-part series on migrating your documentation to KnowledgeOwl!

The first article provided an overview of KnowledgeOwl (KO) and the high standard it sets for knowledge bases (KBs). It also discussed the benefits of planning a knowledge base migration in advance.

The second article continued the migration process and provided in-depth explanations of how to move your documentation to KnowledgeOwl.

This is the third and final article in the series and it covers what to do after you’ve completed the migration and your documentation is up and running. The goal of this article is to highlight some of KnowledgeOwl’s features that can help optimize documentation so users have the best experience possible.

In the previous two articles in this series, the process of migrating my NBA-API Documentation from an existing knowledge base to KnowledgeOwl was used as an example. Now that this knowledge base lives in KnowledgeOwl, it will serve as an example of how some of KnowledgeOwl’s features can be implemented.

All of the KnowledgeOwl features mentioned in this article are thoroughly documented in KnowledgeOwl’s excellent Support Knowledge Base. Links to the support article for each feature are included in case you require a deeper dive than what this article can provide.

Content Organization

KnowledgeOwl has a variety of features that help with organizing your content for the benefit of your users:

• Required Reading
• Article Favorites
• Related Articles
• Glossary

Required Reading

KnowledgeOwl allows you to designate any article in your knowledge base as required so users must acknowledge that they have read and understood them.

This feature is extremely helpful as it can reduce support tickets and help direct users to the most important articles in your knowledge base.

Here’s how to enable Required Reading in your knowledge base:

1. Click on “Required Reading” in the “Settings” section of the left navigation menu.
2. Tick the “Enable” box.
3. Click “Save”.

Here’s how to set any article as Required Reading:

1. Edit an article.
2. Tick the “Require” box under the “Required Reading” heading.
3. Click “Save”.

For any article that has been set as required, users will need to check a box at the bottom of the article to confirm that they have read it.

You can track these acknowledgements by clicking on “Required Reading” in the “Reporting” section of the left navigation menu:

Here’s what it looks like to have Required Reading enabled on my “Introduction to The Static Module” page:

Check out Enable Required Reading and Add a Required Reading article list to your homepage for a deeper dive on how to maximize your usage of this feature.

Article Favorites

Logged-in users can save frequently referenced articles as "favorites" for quick access in the table of contents. This personalized curation enhances the user experience. This won't function if your knowledge base is public and no login is required.

Related Articles

This intelligent content analysis feature automatically surfaces articles that relate to the one you’re currently viewing. By default, this is based on article titles, but you can manually configure Related Articles or combine automatic and manual settings to optimize content discovery for your users.

When you’re editing an article, you can manually designate other articles as related by clicking “Add article” under the “Related Articles” heading in the righthand column of the article editor (pictured below).

The automatic feature works very well as you can see in the screenshot below:

Check out the Related Articles support article to learn more about this feature and how to use it.

Glossary

A comprehensive glossary clarifies complex terminology and reduces user confusion. KnowledgeOwl's Glossary tool lets you alphabetically list all relevant terms with definitions. You can embed the glossary in the table of contents or display term meanings on hover for seamless in-context reference.

To add terms to the Glossary, click on Glossary in the left navigation menu. Then input the Term, Display Title, and Definition.

For more info on the Glossary, check out the Glossary support article.

The image below shows what the Glossary looks like:

User Engagement

Collecting user feedback is vital for continually improving your documentation. Your documentation exists to help users have an excellent experience with your product and KnowledgeOwl has some great features for collecting user feedback.

Comments are enabled by default in your knowledge base so users can share thoughts and questions. If you’d like, you can limit the visibility and permissions of your comments to allow only logged in readers to see and make comments. You also have the ability to approve or delete any comments made in your knowledge base.

For a deeper dive, check out the Comments support article.

KnowledgeOwl also offers article rating systems (thumbs up/down or 5-star) to gauge content performance, with reporting data available in the left navigation menu.

For more information, check out the Ratings support article.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Optimizing your documentation for search engines can help boost its discoverability, traffic, and credibility.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be a complex topic, but you don’t have to be an SEO expert to implement some simple SEO improvements into your documentation.

KnowledgeOwl makes it easy to update the Title Tag and Meta Description for any article. Filling in these sections enhances your SEO which makes it more likely for Google to rank articles from your public knowledge base higher.

Check out KnowledgeOwl's detailed SEO guide and Knowledge base SEO tips for those of us who hate SEO to learn more about SEO best practices.

Optimizing Search 

KnowledgeOwl's robust search functionality deserves particular attention. The image below shows the default search settings:

KnowledgeOwl’s Search functionality is extensive, so it’s not possible to explore all of its possibilities in this article. However, here are some of the options that can refine users’ search experiences:

Pagination is the number of articles that should be returned with each search. The default is 20, and the results are ranked by relevance.

Sorting is an option for users who might not want the most relevant results but instead prefer to view results by relevance, popularity, recency, etc. When Sorting is enabled, the “Sort by” dropdown menu appears below the search box and offers the following sort options:

• Relevance (default, based on search relevance algorithm)
• Popularity (total views)
• Last Updated (date modified)
• Newest (date created)

Autosuggest completes queries as users type for faster, more accurate searches. As you can see from the default search settings pictured above, there are two distinct autosuggest options:

• Autosuggest articles to readers while they type is not typo tolerant, so it’s more suitable for knowledge bases where precision is required and when users are expected to search for specific terms or phrases (e.g. API references, command-line tool documentation, or detailed technical specifications).
• Autosuggest articles and include fuzzy results is typo tolerant, so it’s useful in instances where the documentation has a large amount of text with various keywords and possible variations. Users of this type of documentation may make small typos or interpret search terms in their own way. Fuzzy matching helps to provide more flexibility and improve the overall search experience. It is useful for FAQs, general-purpose documentation, content-heavy websites, etc. 

The autosuggest option that you select should be based on the type of documentation in your knowledge base and the search habits of your target audience.

Another useful feature is Search Testing, which allows you to preview the results of any settings changes before actually committing settings changes. Search Testing is found at the bottom of the Search Settings page:

To further optimize your search, check out the Configure search support article.

Analytics and Insights

While KnowledgeOwl lacks built-in analytics currently, you can integrate popular third-party tools like Google Analytics, PostHog, Plausible, FullStory, Mixpanel, and Hotjar by embedding tracking codes. To learn how to do this, check out KnowledgeOwl’s Analytics support article.

Analytics provide valuable user behavior insights that you can use to enhance your documentation. For example, you can track which search engine terms are driving traffic to your knowledge base. You can also track popular internal search queries to help reveal content needs.

Summary

This article shared some of the ways KnowledgeOwl makes it easy to optimize your documentation. Maintaining accurate, up-to-date documentation demonstrates quality and credibility while preventing user frustration.

KnowledgeOwl's world-class support team and Support Knowledge Base can further guide you in using and mastering KnowledgeOwl to create and maintain exceptional documentation.

Thank you very much for reading this three-part series on migrating your documentation to KnowledgeOwl!