Your help desk is a wonderful source of customer insights that  everyone in your organization can learn from.

Depending on how big your business is and how sophisticated your customers are, you probably have a collection of tools that allow you to:

• Enable customers to submit help tickets and search your knowledge base
• Enable customers live chat with employees or bots
• Determine your customers’ net promoter score

Once you’ve properly configured your help desk, here are five SEO insights you can mine from your help desk analytics and ticket log.

Keyword Research

What are the most common phrases your customers are using when they submit a support ticket or search your knowledge base?

Depending on how robust your ticketing system is, you’ll either be able to see these insights within the app or you can create a spreadsheet of all your tickets with an export.

After exporting a CSV file you can use any number of text analyzer tools to help you identify the most common questions or issues that your customers are dealing with.

Your analytics for your help desk can also help you identify how people are finding your help documentation whether it is through organic search or through your own internal search function.

If you find that people are mainly coming to your help documentation from Google, this is an indication that:

• Either your help documentation layout or search functionality isn’t meeting your customers needs and they are turning to Google for the best documentation
• Or you’re getting search traffic from people who are not your customers

Making your help documentation crawable is a good way to drive a large amount of long tail search traffic. If you’re driving non-customers to your help desk documentation, it is a good opportunity to introduce these visitors to your awareness stage and consideration stage content.

Content Ideation

Once you’ve built your knowledge base and organized it by category, you can mine your analytics data to see the topics that people are spending the most time reading. Using custom reports in Google Analytics is your best friend because it can help you organize your data this way.

This report will let you know about the other documentation you should create or improve through your customer service or marketing teams.

A lot of the time, you may have already written the content but you need to spend time and proving it through video or other content formats.

Don’t forget to submit your help documentation through the Google Search Console. Doing this can help you identify other topics that you are generating impressions for in search regardless of whether you’re actually generating traffic because of those pages

Seasonality Searches

Throughout certain times of the year, people ask certain questions more than others. Analyze your customer ticketing data month-over-month or quarter-over-quarter to identify trends in search behavior.

If you’re able to anticipate the increase and help desk inquiries during certain times of the year, you’ll be a far more proactive marketer or customer success manager.

This data will help you make decisions about the:

• Number of help desk agents you need during various times of day or week
• Articles you need to feature around specific campaigns or product launches
• Ability to differentiate predictable seasonal turn compared to larger systemic churn issues

Product Development

If your knowledge base articles are not gated and are viewable to crawlers, you can pull the Google Search Console data for your keyword impression and click data. You can use the information to identify Trends in integration queries and feature request to help you prioritize your product development decisions.

The Google Search Console also allows you to create an account based on a subdomain or subdirectory so you can isolate the keyword and impression data specific to your help desk.

Device Usability

This will help you learn how people are coming to your help desk. Device level data from Google Analytics lets us see how and in what situations people are looking for help. If you see more help desk where he’s coming from mobile devices, this is an indication that users are running into issues when they are not sitting in front of their computers.

If you pair your device level data with heat mapping and user recordings to quickly identify where users are running into problems, you can create a plan to address and eliminate the roadblocks.

For the greatest chance of success, it’s crucial that you don’t assume all of the search traffic to your help desk or help documentation comes from just your paying customers.

Gathering data from your knowledge base search queries, your Google Search Console keyword level impression data, and basic text analysis of your customer service tickets Allows you to better align your Marketing, sales, and customer support teams. Using this information allows you to be more proactive in meeting your customers needs and drawing in additional prospects.