A help center is a library most of your customers will never visit. The ones who do are usually annoyed, in a hurry, and one bad search away from emailing support anyway. Writing for them is its own craft.
The article that opens
The articles that get read share three properties:
- They answer the question in the title. If the title is "How do I reset my password?", the first paragraph is the answer. Not the context. Not the warning. The answer.
- They're short. Fewer than 300 words for procedural articles. If you need more, you're probably describing two procedures.
- They link sideways. Related articles at the bottom catch the visitor who landed on the wrong one.
Find the gaps
Read the ticket subjects from last quarter. Cluster them. Anything appearing more than 5 times that doesn't have an article is a gap. Nura24 has a tool that does this for you — but a spreadsheet works fine if you don't have one.
Don't optimize for traffic
Help centers are not blogs. Pages-per-session is a vanity metric. The metric you want is deflected tickets — how many customers found their answer without writing in. If you can't measure that, measure the inverse: tickets that quote a help article in their reply (it means the customer found the right article and still needed a human).
That number going down over time is the only thing that matters.