Help articles answer the most specific questions people ask about a product: how to connect it, how to set something up, what a setting does. Those searches come from customers and from prospects checking whether the product can do what they need. AI assistants also use documentation heavily to answer “can X do Y” questions.
Many SaaS help centres are hidden on a third-party platform, behind JavaScript or on a subdomain nobody links to.
Short on time? Comppound does this work for SaaS companies. AI-native, and a person reviews every page.
Have us do itMake it crawlable
Check that help articles are indexable, rendered in HTML, listed in a sitemap and not blocked in robots.txt. Third-party help platforms sometimes default to noindex or render content with scripts.
Write titles as questions
Title help articles as the question a user asks: “How to connect Tallyroom to Xero” rather than “Xero settings”. Answer it in the first lines, then give the steps.
Comppound can do this for you
Want these pages written for you?
Comppound researches, writes and publishes your comparison, alternatives, integration, use-case and pricing pages, checked against competitors on the day. AI-native drafting, and a person reviews every page.
- Gap list of the commercial pages you are missing
- Fair, sourced pages that convert
- Kept current as competitors change
Link docs and marketing
Link from integration and feature pages to the relevant setup articles, and from help articles back to the feature and pricing pages. Prospects reading docs are often close to buying.
Keep it accurate
Out-of-date docs are a frequent source of wrong AI answers. Update articles when the product changes, and remove or redirect articles for retired features.
Worked example · an illustration, not a client result
Tallyroom's help centre fixes
The help centre was on a hosted platform with search indexing switched off by default. Turning it on and fixing titles made it a source of integration traffic.
| Issue | Fix |
|---|---|
| Help centre set to noindex | Allowed indexing |
| Titles like “Xero settings” | “How to connect Tallyroom to Xero” |
| No links from marketing pages | Linked from each integration page |
| Articles for a retired feature | Redirected to the replacement |
Do it yourself
Audit your help centre
- 1Check whether help articles are indexed with a site: search and Search Console.
- 2View source on one article to confirm the text is in the HTML.
- 3Retitle the ten most-viewed articles as questions.
- 4Link each integration and feature page to its setup article.
- 5Remove or redirect articles about retired features.
Free tool for this: AI crawler access checker
Common mistakes
Docs on a forgotten subdomain
If nothing links to the help centre, search engines treat it as unimportant.
Noindex by default
Some help platforms block indexing until you change a setting.
Never updating
Old docs spread old facts into search results and AI answers.
Rather not do it yourself?
Want these pages written for you?
Comppound researches, writes and publishes your comparison, alternatives, integration, use-case and pricing pages, checked against competitors on the day. AI-native drafting, and a person reviews every page.
- Gap list of the commercial pages you are missing
- Fair, sourced pages that convert
- Kept current as competitors change
Questions
A subfolder is simpler, but a well-linked subdomain also works. Linking matters more than location.
They should use the words users search with, which usually means phrasing titles as questions.
Key terms
- Documentation as MarketingDocumentation as marketing treats product docs as a growth channel, since clear, public, findable docs help prospects evaluate and choose a product.
- Subdomain vs subfolderSubdomain vs subfolder is the choice between blog.example.com and example.com/blog. Google says it handles both; the practical differences are real, though.
- NoindexNoindex is a directive, set in a meta tag or HTTP header, that tells search engines not to include a page in their results.
- XML SitemapAn XML sitemap is a file listing the URLs you want search engines to discover and crawl, optionally with each page's last-modified date.
- JavaScript SEOJavaScript SEO is the practice of making sure pages built with JavaScript can be crawled, rendered and indexed by search engines and AI crawlers.
- How-To GuideA how-to guide walks readers through doing a specific task step by step, matching searches that start with "how to" and similar task queries.
