Product Support Pages - a one-stop-shop for existing users - for SEO, UX, and beyond

All too often in large corporations, the primary website is managed and strategy set by the marketing organization. SEO, Analytics/CRO, Web Strategy, Content & Editorial, User Experience - these groups are focused on marketing content, and rightfully so to hit their marketing-focused KPIs and OKRs.

Meanwhile, Documentation, Communities, Help Desk, Knowledgebase, and similar websites are managed by teams outside of marketing. Its not uncommon for these other sites - the post-sales sites - to have content that compete with one another for user attention. Frequently there is no holistic strategy uniting these various sites, along with the primary (marketing) site, to create a seamless visitor experience.

In this article, I'll discuss the importance of the Product Support Page - and its relationship to the more common Product Marketing Page - particularly for B2B websites where the page is typically neglected or at best an afterthought.

What is a Product Support Page? Simply put, its a one-stop-shop, a central location that helps users find the support, documentation, downloads, how-to's, and anything else they need for success. Its easy to find the page using Google, on-site search, or navigation. It cuts through the confusion and clutter of competing information repositories.

Printer Companies Have It Figured Out

Computer printers fail quickly, and often. Outside of a few brands and models, they're basically disposable because of their high failure rate. It costs more to have a printer fixed than to buy a new one. Sometimes it costs more to replace the ink cartridges than to simply buy a new one with new ink cartridges included.

Whatever the reason for computer printers being near universally garbage products, its given the computer printer brands a need to create amazing Product Support Pages. Companies like HP, Epson, and Brother have done a great job of helping users find the Drivers, Manuals, FAQs, How-To's, and other support information they need. (Brother doesn't deserve to be included in this list, their products are best-in-class for reliability but their website - also amazing - is a great example).

Benefits of Product Support Pages

• Saves the company $$ by reducing support tickets. Reduce ticket volume and cost per ticket by helping users self-serve through on-site navigation and Google by creating easily findable, helpful, Product Support Pages. The Help Desk Institute explains that cost per ticket is one of two foundation metrics, the other being customer satisfaction.
• Keeps your existing customers happy. Harvard Business Review notes that acquiring a new customer costs from 5 to 25 times more than retaining an existing customer. It might be a better use of company resources to have your web team focused on retention and a great experience for existing users, than to simply be focused on growing your site's traffic and audience.
• Gives you the opportunity to upsell/cross-sell/promote stuff. Want to promote your annual user conference to your users? Want to suggest your users upgrade to the latest and greatest version of your product? Want to suggest Training & Certification programs? The Product Support Page, after its well established as the central hub for post-sales activities, becomes the prime real estate for reaching your users. Just be judicious here, as the folks coming here probably are not in the right frame of mind to be bombarded with marketing promotions.
• Increase traffic to your site. Stop letting YouTube and 3rd party websites gain traffic at your site's expense, simply because you don't have a destination for existing customers/users looking for answers and help.

Just A Few Best Practices

• Create a Product Support Page for each of your products. This is a one-stop shop to help users find what they need across the many sites and types of content your company offers. This should include deep links to the Community and Knowledgebase, have information about how to submit a support ticket or contact support, and generally aggregate all the details/links/information a reasonable user should need.
• Make your Product Support Page findable on Google. The page shouldn't be hidden behind a login screen - it should be exposed to Googlebot and other crawlers, should have basic SEO techniques around Titles, H1s, and crawlable content applied. Title tags should be something like "Support for [Product Name] | Brand" or "[Product Name] Support | Brand".
• Link - very visibly - to your Product Support Page from your Product Marketing Page. If a user visits your homepage, uses the "Product" navigation to arrive on the basic product page....then what? Are there Support materials available there? Does a user have to go searching within the page to find the link? Help your existing customers and users by making it easy to move from the marketing content to the post-sales content.
• Don't force users to pick a subsection of your site before identifying their product. Your customer has a problem with or question about their product - they don't know if they'll find the answer in your Documentation, a Wiki, an FAQ page, a Community, if they need to submit a ticket, talk to a chatbot, call a phone number, contact their sales rep. They don't know. Don't make them select one of your content repositories and then find their product. Flip the script, let them identify their product and then you should provide to them all of the pathways and details needed to solve their problem.
• Ungate your Knowledgebase and related content - and always link back to the Product Support Pages. As I discussed a while ago on Search Engine Journal, you can apply SEO Strategies for Knowledge Base Self-Serve Customer Success to reduce support ticket volume and keep your customers happy. If a user searches Google for an error code or similar, be sure the Knowledgebase article they arrive on links prominently to the related Product Support Page to help the user find related post-sales content and they need to have a great customer experience.

Do You Need Product Support Pages?

This is an easy test! For a moment, imagine you are the user of one of your products, and you have a question, error, or issue with the product. What are the actions you could take to find a resolution?

• Visit your website - if a user visits your homepage, how quickly can they find the resource they need? What if they use on-site search? What if they navigate using the primary navigation? Will they easily find the answers?
• Use Google - if a user Googles "Support for [Product Name]" what do they find? Are the top results on your website or some other website?
• How many post-sales information repositories do you have? If its more than 1 or 2, you've probably got a problem with users not knowing which repository to choose when trying to resolve their issue. Forcing users to pick a repository - before they identify which product they're seeking help with - means the users must waste time and never really be sure if they're in the right place.

Wrapping Up

Creating Product Support Pages might not be on anyone's radar in your organization because...who's job is it? Its not clearly marketing or the owners of any particular information repository. It requires a holistic strategy for post-sales customer experience that might not align to any existing OKRs.

That sure doesn't mean its not important! Perhaps the most important work your SEO, UX, Web Strategy, and Conversion Optimization teams could be taking on is improving the outcomes for existing customers. Keeping customers happy, reducing the number of Support tickets. You might not be able to measure its impact on marketing - a statement true about most of the most important acts of marketing - but nothing could be more important for gaining new customers than word of mouth coming from great experiences from your existing customer base.