Does Your Content Need Help? - Here’s an Easy Fix

When you put content on your website, the whole point - or at least the hope - is that people are actually reading it and finding it relevant, useful, and interesting. Because that’s the kind of content that increases traffic, drives conversion, and encourages long-term growth and success. 

Unfortunately, this is traditionally much easier said than done, since audience perception is difficult to gauge and, by extension, difficult to act upon.

With AnswerDash, it’s easy. Here’s how our helpfulness ratings can help you get a real pulse on your content performance - and why that’s so important today. 

The Goal: A High Performing Site

Today, customer expectations are at an all-time high, and users simply don’t want to search through a site page or spend hours sifting through a knowledge base to find the answers they need. 

What’s more - if they don’t find the information that they’re looking for easily and efficiently, they’ll likely end up simply abandoning the site or submitting a support ticket - neither of which are ideal for you.

You have a very slim window of time, then, to make a positive impression and ensure that your content is really resonating with your users. And it can be difficult to know exactly how to do that. That’s because measuring things like customer engagement, customer impression, and content performance typically requires: 

  • A/B testing

  • Surveys

  • Measuring on-page user behavior like time on page, pages per session, and bounce rate

  • Analysis of keywords and customer activity on a tool like Buzzsumo.

And these tools are great. The problem is that they can be time-consuming and labor-intensive - not to mention that it can take months to really understand the big picture and any overarching trends. 

There’s a Better Way: Helpfulness Ratings

AnswerDash’s helpfulness ratings make all of this much easier and more straightforward, allowing you to get a better understanding of your customers and content performance with just a few clicks. Here’s how it works. 

There are two ways for AnswerDash customers to access and understand their content’s helpfulness ratings. First, they can go through the AnswerDash dashboard and look directly at the “Helpfulness Ratings” card. This will give them an overall helpfulness rating for their site - or, in other words, a percentage of how many people found the site’s content helpful vs how many people didn’t. This can help users get a more generalized idea of content performance an user interactions. 

For more specific feedback, AnswerDash administrators can also look at the helpfulness rating attached to each individual AnswerDash question. They simply go into the Q&A section of the customer tool, look at published questions, and check on the right-hand side for the helpfulness percentage - and any associated feedback - of every question. 

From there, users can actually click on each individual question or filter questions based on which are the least helpful or the most helpful. 

This kind of information can have a tremendously positive impact, providing a more efficient, effective way to understand customer inquiries and make large-scale site improvements - no extra footwork and no more blind updates. Plus, it can help users effectively reduce support tickets and cost for their business. 

SEE ALSO: FILL IN YOUR CONTENT GAPS WITH TRENDING TOPICS 

Here’s how to make that happen: 

Using Helpfulness Ratings to Draw Actionable Insights -:

It has to be said: sometimes, feedback won’t be helpful. Especially if it’s not specific or if users don’t give a clear reason as to why they gave the rating they did, it can be difficult to use the rating to plan an effective course of action. Percentage-wise, though, the feedback can be really helpful no matter what. 

Generally speaking, a good target is a 70% helpfulness rating. If the question - or the site - has a helpfulness rating of 70% or over, that indicates that the content was pretty good and helpful. If not, it’s likely time to look for the problematic questions and make some changes. 

This can be done, first, on an individual Q&A basis: users can sort the content by lowest helpfulness rating to identify the “least helpful” copy on their site and chip away at the help content that needs the most work.

It can also be done on a more generalized scale. Here, it’s important to keep an eye on trends and patterns across the site and across questions. Are all of the questions on a particular page scoring poorly? Is there one topic that is scoring extremely well? Is there a product that has high associated helpfulness ratings? 

Pay attention to these trends and figure out the overarching patterns or mindsets that they seem to indicate - it can show you if there’s a content problem on your website page or if your customer is interacting with your site in an unexpected way. From there, you can not only improve your Q&A but also tweak your website or even change your product or service to address customer concerns and interests. 

Stay On Top of Customer Sentiment -:

Next, when you do make those changes and create new content based on user feedback, the tool with track your changes and allow you to see both the old rating and the new comments on content that has been updated. That way, you can see the impact and benefits of your updates in real time.

In the big picture, this doesn’t just provide AnswerDash customers with insights into users’ questions, but with vital information that they can use to improve operations, avoid ticket overload, remedy any content gaps that may exist on their sites and knowledge bases, and more. 

What are you waiting for? Get started improving your site today.