A knowledge base can be a powerful and useful tool for your business. It can enhance communication in your team and improve customer support by providing information in one centralized space.
However, in order to become a useful and valuable tool, a knowledge base has to be skillfully and masterfully created. In this post, we’re going to guide you on how to do that.
This guide will cover steps on how to create a knowledge base in a simple and easy way. We’ve made it specifically to be easy to understand so that everyone can follow along, even if they don’t have any prior experience with building KBs.
Create your knowledge base with Helpjuice ↗
7 Steps to Creating a Powerful and Comprehensive Knowledge Base
All it takes to create a knowledge base is seven steps. That’s it. There is no complex rigmarole that you need to involve yourself in.
Here is a list-wise breakdown of the steps. You can click one each section to directly navigate to it. If you want to start reading from the top, simply start scrolling.
- Step 1: Define Your Goals for Your Knowledge Base
- Step 2: Identify the Content to Include
- Step 3: Develop a Structure
- Step 4: Write Knowledge Base Content
- Step 5: Make Knowledge Base Content Accessible
- Step 6: Measure Knowledge Base Impact
- Step 7: Update & Improve Knowledge Base Over Time
Step 1: Define Your Goals for Your Knowledge Base
The first step in creating a knowledge base is to define the goals that you wish to achieve with it. This is important as it lets you understand how the KB has to be designed and how the content has to be published.
There are a number of different goals that a knowledge base can be used to achieve. We’ll list them here below for your convenience. You can pick and choose the ones that you want and then we will talk about what you need to do to practically achieve those goals.
Common Knowledge Base Goals
- Reduce support ticket volume
- Improve customer onboarding
- Centralize internal documentation
- Speedup employee training
- Increase product adoption
- Build customer trust and confidence
- Reduce training costs
- Improve team efficiency
What Various Goals Translate To
Goals Focused on Customers (Reducing Support, Onboarding, Product Adoption)
If your goals involve helping customers, whether that's reducing support tickets, improving onboarding, or increasing product adoption, you're building a customer-facing knowledge base.
What this translates to practically:
Your content needs to be written for people who don't work at your company. That means clear language, no internal jargon, and step-by-step instructions that assume the reader knows nothing. You'll organize content around common questions and tasks, not around how your product is built internally.
You'll need search functionality that works well because customers won't always know where to look. You'll also need analytics to track which articles get viewed most and which searches come up empty—that tells you what content is missing.
Your knowledge base will likely be public or accessible without a login. It might live on a subdomain of your website, like help.yourcompany.com or support.yourcompany.com. You'll probably link to it from your main site, your app, and your support emails.
Goals Focused on Internal Teams (Centralizing Documentation, Training, Team Efficiency)
If your goals involve helping your own employees, centralizing documentation, speeding up training, or improving team efficiency, you're building an internal knowledge base.
What this translates to practically:
Your content will include things customers should never see: internal processes, company policies, login credentials, vendor contacts, and workflow documentation. You'll organize content by department or function—HR, IT, Sales, Operations—so people can find what's relevant to their role.
You'll need permissions and access control because not everyone should see everything. HR policies might be open to all employees, but financial data or executive strategy documents should be restricted.
Your knowledge base will be private, probably behind a login or VPN. It might live on an intranet or be part of a tool your team already uses. You'll integrate it with your communication tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams so people can search it without leaving their workflow.
Goals Focused on Both (Trust, Reducing Costs, Mixed Audiences)
If your goals involve a mix—building trust, reducing costs, or serving multiple audiences—you're likely building a hybrid knowledge base that handles both customer-facing and internal content.
What this translates to practically:
You'll need to separate public content from private content, either by using two different knowledge bases or by setting up strict permissions in one system. Some articles will be visible to everyone, others only to logged-in customers, and others only to employees.
Your organization structure will be more complex because you're serving different audiences with different needs. You might have a "Help Center" section for customers and an "Internal Wiki" section for employees, all under the same roof.
You'll need to think about branding and tone. Customer-facing content should match your public brand and be polished. Internal content can be more casual and direct. You'll also need to decide who's responsible for maintaining each type of content—support teams handle customer docs, HR handles internal policies, and so on.
Step 2: Identify the Content to Include
Once you know what you want your knowledge base to achieve, the next step is figuring out what actually goes into it. This isn't just about picking topics. It's also about choosing the right format for each piece of content.
The format matters because people consume information differently depending on what they're trying to do. Someone troubleshooting a bug wants quick, scannable steps. Someone learning a new feature might prefer a detailed walkthrough with screenshots. Someone who's never used your product before might need a video that shows them exactly what to click.
If you pick the wrong format, even great content won't help. A 2,000-word essay explaining how to reset a password is overkill. A single sentence telling someone how to set up a complex integration isn't enough. Matching the format to the task makes your knowledge base more useful and keeps people from bouncing away frustrated.
Content Formats and When to Use Them
Step-by-Step Guides: Use these when someone needs to complete a specific task with a clear outcome. Password resets, account setup, configuration walkthroughs, installation instructions—anything with a defined beginning and end.
FAQs: Use these for quick, common questions that don't need much explanation. Pricing questions, policy clarifications, feature availability, basic definitions. Keep answers short—two or three sentences max.
Troubleshooting Articles: Use these when something isn't working and the user needs to diagnose and fix the problem. Error messages, performance issues, bugs, unexpected behavior. Organize these as "Problem → Cause → Solution."
Video Tutorials: Use these for visual processes where showing is better than telling. Software walkthroughs, design tutorials, physical product demonstrations, anything with a UI that changes frequently. Videos work well for onboarding and feature discovery.
Reference Documentation: Use these for technical specs, API details, feature lists, or anything someone needs to look up rather than read front-to-back. Developers love this format. So do power users who already know the basics.
Conceptual Explanations: Use these when someone needs to understand why something works the way it does before they can use it. System architecture, business logic, workflows, best practices. These are longer and more narrative.
Checklists: Use these for processes with multiple steps that need to be completed in order. Onboarding new employees, launching a project, pre-flight checks, quality assurance. People can print these or work through them one item at a time.
Comparison Tables: Use these when someone is choosing between options. Feature comparisons, plan differences, product tiers, tool recommendations. Tables let people scan and compare quickly.
Screenshots and Diagrams: Use these to support other formats, not as standalone content. A step-by-step guide is clearer with screenshots. A troubleshooting article benefits from a diagram showing where the problem is.
Mix formats based on your audience and goals. A customer-facing knowledge base might lean heavily on FAQs and video tutorials. An internal knowledge base might be mostly reference docs and checklists.
How to Shortlist and Select Topics for Your Knowledge Base
You can't document everything at once. You need to prioritize. Start with the content that solves the biggest problems or gets referenced most often.
Pull Data from Your Support Channels
If you have a support team, they're sitting on a goldmine of information. Look at your support ticket history and identify the most common questions. What do people ask about repeatedly? What issues take the longest to resolve because the answer isn't documented anywhere?
Tag your tickets by topic or issue type if you're not already doing that. After a month or two, you'll see patterns. Those patterns tell you what content to create first.
If you don't have a formal support system, check your email inbox, your community forum, or wherever customers or employees ask questions. The same principles apply. Look for repetition.
Ask Your Team What They're Tired of Explaining
Your support team, sales team, onboarding team, and customer success team all answer the same questions over and over. Sit down with them and ask: "What do you wish was already documented?"
Make a list. Rank it by how often each topic comes up. The stuff at the top of the list is your priority content.
Analyze Your Product or Service
Walk through your product as if you're a new user. What's confusing? What requires explanation? What would you Google if you got stuck?
Make note of every feature, setting, or workflow that isn't immediately obvious. Those are all potential knowledge base articles.
If you're building an internal knowledge base, do the same thing with your company processes. Walk through onboarding, expense reporting, time-off requests, IT setup—anything that requires steps. Document the non-obvious parts.
Check Your Analytics
If you already have some content published (maybe on your website or in scattered Google Docs), check which pages get the most traffic. High-traffic content is clearly valuable—make sure it's included in your knowledge base and kept up to date.
Also check your search analytics if you have a search bar on your site. What are people searching for? If they're searching for something you don't have content on, that's a gap you need to fill.
Start with the Basics
Before you document advanced features or edge cases, make sure you've covered the fundamentals. New users need to know how to get started, how to navigate, and how to complete basic tasks. If those aren't documented, everything else is useless.
Create a list of "must-have" articles that every knowledge base in your category should have. For a SaaS product, that might be account creation, login, password reset, basic navigation, and first-time setup. For an internal knowledge base, that might be company policies, IT support contacts, time-off requests, and expense reporting.
Get those done first. Then move on to intermediate and advanced topics.
Group Topics into Categories
Once you have a list of topics, start grouping them. You'll end up with natural clusters—getting started, account management, billing, integrations, troubleshooting, and so on.
These clusters will eventually become your knowledge base structure. You don't need to finalize the structure yet, but grouping topics helps you see what you're working with and whether you're missing entire categories.
Prioritize Based on Impact
You can't write everything at once, so rank your topics by impact. High-impact topics are the ones that:
- Get asked most frequently
- Take the most time to answer manually
- Block users from completing important tasks
- Cause the most frustration when not documented
Start with high-impact topics. Write those first. Lower-impact topics can wait.
Don't aim for perfection on day one. It's better to have 20 solid, useful articles than 100 half-finished drafts. You can always add more content later.
Step 3: Develop a Structure for Your Knowledge Base
Whether internal or external, your knowledge base needs to be organized intuitively for it to be of any use.
Once you’ve brainstormed a sufficient amount of topics to get your KB started, you can begin categorizing and prioritizing them.
Organize Content Topics by Theme
As you analyze your list of brainstormed topics, a number of themes should begin to emerge.
Of course, these themes will be unique to the purpose of your knowledge base. A few examples of themes you might find:
- Certain “levels” of customers (e.g., newly-onboarded users, power-users, etc.)
- Specific products, and specific features of these products
- Processes for engaging with your company in various ways
These themes will serve as the foundation of your knowledge base. Think of them as knowledge domains (which, as get to, will be broken down into more specifics in the near future.)
Formant’s knowledge base, for example, focuses on serving users with varying levels of knowledge and experience:
TCL’s knowledge base focuses more on product-specific knowledge:
Finally, CheckYeti’s knowledge base focuses heavily on procedural or instructional guidance, overall:
The idea is to understand what your users will be looking for within your knowledge base, and how they will expect to find it when logging on. As we’ll discuss, this requires thinking like your users — and presenting your knowledge content in a way that best allows them to get the information they need.
Create Categories and Subcategories
You’ll then need to break down each thematic domain into categories — which will then be broken down even further into even more specific subcategories.
Here’s how Formant does it:
Again, the knowledge is presented to guide beginners, power users, and all in-between to the right area of the site — and to the exact information they need to make progress in their journey. On a more functional note, it’s also easy for users to browse the knowledge base’s various topics in a more organized and efficient way.
For now, though, our focus is simply on identifying the categories to use when creating your knowledge base. We’ll worry about putting it all together later on.
Classify Knowledge Content by Importance
Finally, rank your brainstormed topics in terms of importance to the user.
For one thing, this will allow you to get the most important information “out there” as quickly as possible. Obviously, you want to cover your user’s more pressing issues before covering the less-impactful stuff.
(You’ll get to that stuff eventually, of course!)
Secondly, it allows you to focus your users on the most important information you have available — which will in turn point them toward further research as needed.
PayrollPanda’s knowledge base, for example, presents a number of common questions and most-viewed topics from the start:
Note the CTA’s to “See more”, indicating that the KB includes much more information — but that the topics presented front-and-center are things the user absolutely needs to know before diving deeper.
There’s no sugarcoating it:
These first two preparatory steps are pretty involved.
But:
They’re 100% necessary in order to create a knowledge base that’s actually worth using. More than that, they make the process of actually putting everything together that much easier.
Speaking of that…
Step 4: Writing Knowledge Base Content
So far, you’ve:
- Created a basic thematic and functional structure for your knowledge base
- Identified topics and specific items to focus on when creating knowledge content
- Organized these topics based on priority to the user
Now, you’ll be shifting toward the actual creation of knowledge content. Before you even create your first knowledge asset, though, there’s a bit more planning to do.
First: Create a Style Guide
Creating a style guide for your knowledge base ensures uniformity across the board.
This is especially important here, as the knowledge creation process regularly involves team members from multiple departments at various times. With so many hands on deck, a style guide will ensure they all follow the same guidelines when collaborating on new content.
(It also helps avoid disagreements when misalignment occurs. Just refer to the style guide, figure out the issue, and move on.)
Some key points to address within your style guide:
- Content tone
- Content structure
- Overall presentation of knowledge content
Your content marketing style guide can be a good start here — with a few adjustments.
Overall, your knowledge content should be:
- More formal
- More focused
- More functional
While allowing your brand’s personality to peek through is acceptable, it shouldn’t overshadow the information presented in your knowledge base. Keep things friendly and comfortable — but ultimately professional.
Pre-Content Creation
Once you have a set list of topics to create knowledge assets on, you’ll then need to determine:
- How to best present the knowledge in question
- Who should be involved in creating the knowledge content
How to Best Present Your Knowledge
The purpose of your knowledge base is to transfer knowledge to stakeholders as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Luckily, teams today can use a mixture of text, video, and audio formats to showcase knowledge and information throughout their knowledge base.
The key here is to know which format to use for specific occasions.
For simpler questions and explanations, text may suffice.
A mixture of text and multimedia content is often necessary. For example, knowledge assets showcasing step-by-step instructions will often include images to keep the user on track toward success.
.png)
This step is crucial for each piece of knowledge you create, as it ensures the information presented is received loud and clear — just as you’d intended.
Who to Involve When Creating Knowledge Content
It’s just as important to involve the right team members in the creation of specific knowledge assets.
Depending on your team’s structure and capabilities, you’ll ideally want to include some combination of the following:
- Knowledge Expert or Managers, who will guide the team through the knowledge creation process — and may actually create the knowledge assets in question
- Subject Matter Experts, who will ensure the knowledge created is accurate and thorough
- Creatives, who may help develop any A/V knowledge content — and may have a hand in fine-tuning the presentation of knowledge to the end-user
Again, it’s a matter of knowing who’s involved — and doing what’s needed to keep everyone on the same page.
Knowledge Content Best Practices
Creating individual knowledge base articles is an involved process that’s worthy of its own deep dive.
If you don’t have time to check out our article on writing a knowledge base article, here are the main things you need to know when creating actual knowledge base content:
- Create with the user in mind to ensure knowledge is well-received. The more user-friendly the experience, the more effective your knowledge content will be.
- Be comprehensive. Never assume that your user already knows something or how to do something — and always clarify what you mean when using certain terminology and verbiage.
- Keep things as simple as necessary — while also providing opportunities for your users to dig deeper. That way, your knowledge base immediately serves those looking for quick answers, while also putting them on the fast track to power-usage.
- Interlink, interlink, interlink. Those looking for clarification on quick questions will get the explanations they need, while power-users can dive deeper into more technical topics as needed.
- Request feedback on each knowledge base page you create. As we’ll discuss, this will allow you to make laser-focused improvements to your KB over time.
FASO’s knowledge base checks each of these boxes:
As long as you follow these best practices for each knowledge base page you create, you can be sure that it will provide top-notch value to your team, and to your end-users.
Step 5: Make Knowledge Content Accessible and Available
Unfortunately, your stakeholders and users aren’t just going to start using your knowledge base just because it’s there.
And they certainly won’t use it if it’s not easy to do so.
For both internal and external use cases, then, you need to ensure your knowledge base is ever-accessible — and that it ultimately becomes a go-to resource for your users and stakeholders.
Ensure Accessibility and Usability
Your first order of business here is to make sure your knowledge base functions and presents knowledge content just as you’d intended.
Some technical things to consider:
- Is your content formatted correctly?
- Is your multimedia content shown correctly?
- Are the links within your knowledge content functional and correct?
- Does your knowledge base’s search feature turn up appropriate results?
While modern knowledge base tools typically guarantee this usability on the technical end, it’s your job to ensure your KB content is free from human error that could derail the user experience altogether.
Promote and Leverage Your Knowledge Content
The next step is to get your stakeholders onboard with using your knowledge base on a regular basis.
Internally, you again should be continually injecting use of your KB throughout your team’s normal workflows. Your employees should also be able to access the internal portal from any internet-ready device and/or location.
For customer-facing knowledge bases, visibility is huge. The entire point is self-service — so if your customers can’t find your knowledge base without help, it pretty much defeats the purpose.
So, you need to promote your knowledge base where you know your customers will be looking for help.
Most importantly, your customers should be able to get to your KB from any page on your site.
Your chatbot and live chat engagements are another great spot to nudge your users toward your knowledge base.
As appropriate, you might also include links to your knowledge base within your blog content, social media posts, and other more marketing-focused efforts. Similarly, you might link to your KB within a service or support email to point the user toward further reading.
Search engine optimization is another key way to promote your knowledge base content to your target audience. Thankfully, tools like Helpjuice help you optimize your knowledge base content specifically for this purpose.
Whether they’re looking for product specs, troubleshooting instructions, or brand-related info, the world of self-service is just a few clicks away — all they need is a quick nudge in the right direction.
Step 6: Measure How Your Knowledge Base Is Used & Its Impact
Over time, you’ll know if your efforts have been successful — and if your knowledge base is doing what you’d intended for it to do.
Figuring all this out will require digging into the metrics revolving around the following questions.
How Are Your Users Engaging With Your Knowledge Base?
First of all, you need to know how your users — be them your employees or your customers — are engaging with your knowledge base, in both a quantitative and qualitative sense.
Quantitatively, you’ll start by analyzing the traffic your knowledge base is getting.
If your overall traffic numbers don’t meet your expectations, you may need to improve your KB’s accessibility, along with your promotional efforts.
(If your knowledge base’s traffic is way higher than anticipated...well, let’s not go there :)
From there, you can identify the pages that are visited most frequently, as well as those that have out-of-the-ordinary numbers regarding Time on Page and the like.
From this quantitative baseline, you can then start thinking more qualitatively — and more contextually. Here, your goal is to identify the potential reason(s) for any anomalies in order to make the proper adjustments.
For example, a low time-on-page might mean that a certain knowledge asset is incredibly helpful...or it could mean it’s not helpful at all. Building context, then, will enable you to draw the right conclusions from this usage data.
In this example, you’d look at your users’ on-site paths to see what search terms were used, what other pages were visited, and which pages they spent the most time on.
Which brings us to our next question...
How Does Your Knowledge Base Impact User Experience and Performance?
You also want to know what your users think of your knowledge base — and how it’s impacting their ability to succeed.
The simplest way to do this is with a quick, one-question survey on each of your KB pages.
Ideally, you can then track those who take the time to answer this survey — and deliver a follow-up questionnaire via email. Alternatively, you can send out a blast survey at regular intervals, specifically focused on the impact your KB has had on your user’s performance and other such factors.
Dive deeper into how to collect feedback from your knowledge base users with the following post.
You might also target those who fit certain criteria to gather more insight into their knowledge base usage.
On the customer side, reach out to those whose engagement and/or purchase metrics have increased as of late to see if your KB had any impact on the change. Internally, this insight can best be gleaned from those whose performance has quickly improved through use of your knowledge base.
In any case, your goal is to understand the value your knowledge base is bringing to your end-users — and to recognize what improvements need to be made.
How Has Your Knowledge Base Impacted Your Business?
Your efforts to develop a comprehensive knowledge base — internal, customer-facing, or both — should ultimately improve your operations and lead to business growth.
As we discussed earlier, there are a number of metrics to focus on here.
External Knowledge Base Business Impact
For customer-facing knowledge bases, you’ll be looking to connect increased KB engagement to increases in engagement and purchase instances.
Again using both quantitative and qualitative customer data, you’ll start to see the impact your knowledge base has had on your audience’s purchasing decisions, spending habits, and brand loyalty.
You can also trace the impact your external KB has had on your customer service and support teams, as well. Ideally, you’ll see fewer support tickets, quicker response times, and better outcomes.
It’s simple:
More engaged and informed customers, plus more productive and supportive service teams, equals major improvements to your bottom line.
Internal Knowledge Base Business Impact
Similarly, your internal knowledge base should serve to improve your team’s productivity, your customers’ engagement and satisfaction levels, and your bottom line.
For internal KBs used throughout your organization, you’ll be tracing usage metrics to individual department-wide, and organization-wide improvements in performance. Using your pre-KB performance and profit metrics as a baseline, you’ll gain a more informed understanding of the impact your efforts have had on your business.
If your internal KB is meant for use by your IT staff when serving other departments, you’ll be tracing improved IT support metrics to improved team productivity — and, in turn, to increased profits for your business.
Helpjuice’s knowledge base software makes analyzing these and other metrics a snap. In many cases, it takes guesswork completely out of the equation — and actually tells you exactly how to improve moving forward.
Step 7: Update and Improve Your Knowledge Base Over Time
Your organizational knowledge, and your organization as a whole, is constantly evolving.
And your knowledge base(s) should continuously evolve along with it — in two key ways.
Keep Knowledge Content Up to Date
At any given moment, you may need to update your existing knowledge base to reflect the most accurate and current state of things.
This includes:
- Updating product-focused pages when new versions are released, or new features are added
- Updating workflow documentation to reflect newly-discovered best practices
- Updating directory information to streamline hands-on engagements between all stakeholders
Needless to say, if your knowledge base isn’t kept current, it will actually lead to more friction for your customers, your team, and your business.
In making knowledge management a routine part of your team’s processes, though, you’ll always keep all stakeholders up-to-date on what they need to know to be productive and successful.
Improve Knowledge Base Efforts and Initiatives
More than just keeping your knowledge base content current, you’ll also need to improve your overall approach to managing your KB over time.
Using the performance data you collect as a guide, you’ll be able to make laser-focused improvements to your knowledge base in terms of:
- Structure: Improving the organization and presentation of knowledge to further enable both quick learning experiences and deep dives as needed.
- Visibility, Accessibility, and Usability: Ensuring stakeholders know to use your KB when necessary, and are able to access and use it at all times.
- Content: Improving the value and effectiveness of your knowledge content by adding more info, creating supplementary multimedia content, and prompting further learning.
As with all business initiatives, there will always be something you can do to improve and enhance your knowledge base. In taking a strategic, data-driven approach to making these changes, you all but ensure a better future for your organization.
Okay:
We’ve given you everything you need to know to start creating a knowledge base — and to develop it so that it moves in the right direction in due time.
While it certainly won’t happen overnight, building your knowledge base up from nothing doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact, the right software can make doing so a breeze for even the least tech-savvy teams out there.
If you haven’t yet, check out how Helpjuice can get your knowledge management efforts started on the right foot. Once you’re ready, schedule a demo with our team to get started with a free trial to Helpjuice!
