Your Knowledge Base Articles Need Better Titles

By Leslie O’FlahavanShare

You’re exhausted. Your knowledge base has 23 bazillion articles in it, and at least 4 bazillion of them are hard to read, outdated or useless. You can’t imagine a world in which you’ll ever have the time or the people to help you clean up the KB.

Take heart. One small fix will immediately make your articles more findable and readable: write a better title. Even if you lack the bandwidth to improve the article itself, a better title can help users find the article and quickly decide whether it has the information they need. (In good conscience, I must mention that you should improve the article itself, but that's a topic for another day.)

No contest: The title is the most-read part of the KB article

The title is doing all the work. Before they read even one word of the article, users rely on the title to answer fundamental self-service questions:

Is this the information I’m looking for?
Will this article help me complete a task or fix a problem?
Is this article written in a way I can understand?
Does this article contain current, trustworthy info?

3 familiar types of bad KB article titles

Check your knowledge base. Does it include weak article titles like these?

1. The topic title that should be a task title

NC State University’s Campus IT Service Portal contains an article titled, “Mobility Print.” That’s a topic title; it names the topic of the article, but it doesn’t forecast the article content properly. The article includes links to instructions for configuring your device’s operating system to use Mobility Print. The article needs a task title, such as “How to Set Up Your Device for Mobility Print” or “Setting Up Your Device for Mobility Print.”

2. The “no one searches for that” title

The Campus IT Service Portal has an article titled, “Initial Password Change,” which explains the three parts to setting up your NC State account for the first time: two-factor authentication, security questions and a different password than the default. The article is well-written, though it does have a long introductory section before the instructions begin. But no one who has a question about why they need to change their password will ever search for the words, “Initial Password Change.” That’s what the technical support team calls it; not what users call it. The article needs a title that uses the same words humans use to search, something like “Changing Default Password” or “Password Change for Account Set-up.”

3. The content mismatch title

In a KB article titled “When do change approvals occur?,” the word “when” is doing a lot of work. “When” questions usually yield timeframe or condition answers. But the content of the change approvals article doesn’t match its title. Instead, the article explains who approves a change, how the change moves from authorized to scheduled and how normal and emergency changes differ. It doesn’t directly explain “when” change approvals occur. If the title’s going to be written in the form of a user question, it should be something like “How are normal and emergency changes approved?”

Six ways to write an effective title for a knowledge base article

Your knowledge base contains many types of articles, so you'll need several different ways to title articles. Here are six strong formats for writing article titles.

1. The How-To title. Task-based titles identify the action users want to complete; the KB article explains the steps to completing that task. How-to titles include a verb, either in command (imperative) form or gerund (-ing) form.

Examples of How-To titles:

2. The Symptom title. Symptom titles are great for users who are experiencing a problem, but don't know the cause. These titles use the language the user would type into a search engine — often the exact error message or a description of the failure. To write a dymptom title, name the symptom or the error code plus the context.

Examples of Symptom titles:

3. The Question title. Users love Question titles because these titles present users’ words verbatim or nearly so. This title is likely to be the same set of words the user put in the search field, which means that when the question-titled article shows up in search results, the user thinks, “Yes, that’s exactly what I was looking for!” And question titles benefit from the concrete questions words they include. “Why” questions always yield reason answers, “how” questions yield method answers and “where” questions yield location answers.

Examples of Question titles:

4. The Reference title. Use reference titles for KB articles that contain a body of knowledge or a source of truth, not a task or response to an error message. Reference titles work well for articles that provide facts, specification, or a directory of information. At all costs, though, avoid using a reference title on a how-to article. The best reference titles have two parts: the topic plus some context or clarification.

Examples of Reference titles:

5. The User Persona title. These titles mention the intended reader; they help specific groups of people find answers or resources. A user persona title is great when the advice for one group of people differs a lot from the advice for another group or when one group is acutely affected, but others are not.

Examples of User Persona titles:

6. The Internal Monologue title. If your review of users’ search terms shows that they use, “I can’t…” when they search, you may want to title your articles the same way. These “Why can’t I…” or “I can’t…” titles for KB articles help highly frustrated users because they see their emotional state reflected back to them in search results.

Examples of Internal Monologue titles:

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