An Intercom Articles Example that is also SEO Smart

Last updated on June 13th, 2023

Pardeep Kullar
Pardeep Kullar

Your Intercom Articles (previously known as Intercom Educate) can be structured to answer questions quickly and attract new leads. See real examples of how to find out which articles to write and how to write those articles to attract new leads.

Related: Yes, you can See the User's Screen from Intercom

Also see: 9 Smart Hacks to Use With Intercom

Fun read: How a Google Algorithm Change Halved the Daily Mail's Traffic

Find out which articles to write using SEMRush and Google

Users will ask you questions and you'll create articles over time to answer those questions. Those are the easy articles to create.

There are also other questions they don't ask but will search for.

If you want to find out what they need help with, use both SEMRush and Google.

SEMRush will tell you what they search for and how many times they search for it. Google will give you more information about those searches.

Use them to make a list of the most important articles that both your users and potential users would appreciate seeing.

Here's a practical example of using those tools

Upscope co-browsing is no-download instant screen sharing that integrates into live chat tools like Intercom.

We want to set up lots of articles that answer all the key questions they have about co-browsing.

Here's how we know what questions people ask about co-browsing.

Enter the term cobrowsing into SEMRush and you'll see the following including the number of searches made:

Screen-Shot-2018-11-08-at-16.33.26

Enter 'cobrowsing' into Google, scroll to the bottom of the results and you'll see the following related searches.

Screen-Shot-2018-11-08-at-15.52.49-1

It's an art and a science. If you understand the intent behind their searches and how it relates to your product then use that and the volume of searches to figure out the priority list of articles to write.

See the Upscope cobrowsing Intercom articles section here.

How can you structure all your articles to get the maximum SEO advantage? Ever heard of topic clusters?

Hubspot is a large organisation, famous for inbound marketing.

They doubled their already significant traffic by re-organising their content using a topic cluster strategy to adjust to the way Google has changed its search algorithms.

Below we’ll give you a brief overview of what we’re doing to similarly adjust and apply this plan to both our blog and to Intercom’s Articles module.

Rather than looking for keywords and writing an individual article on it, you create a central pillar page like ‘21 Ways to Acquire Customers’ with 21 or more individual articles that link to that pillar page and to each other.

“Pillar page acts as the main hub of content for a overarching topic and multiple content pages that are related to that same topic link back to the pillar page and to each other.” Mimi An

“The first step to creating a pillar page is to stop thinking about your site in terms of just keywords. Start thinking about the topics you want to rank for first — then, brainstorm blog topic ideas based on more specific keywords related to the broader topic.” Sofia Bernazzani

If you actually HATE the idea of using SEO but want to use it successfully then read this and you'll really get why topic clusters work and how to do them.

Old Hubspot blog structure

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New Hubspot blog structure

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Matthew Barby is the hubspot lead who started this new strategy and the article linked just below is an example of his pillar page that ranks at the top in Google for customer acquisition:
https://www.matthewbarby.com/customer-acquisition-strategies/

Examples of applying topic clusters to Intercom Articles

Intercom’s Articles module is SEO friendly.

It’s not mean’t to be flooded with marketing posts but it can be made to work as a topic cluster that brings more traffic.

See Upscope's Intercom Article topic cluster

We've started doing the same topic cluster model with our Intercom Articles.

We're targeting the keyword co-browsing.

See our help section on co-browsing.

The good thing is that the very questions that people ask in live chat are often the ones they Google for.

See Upscope's blog for further topic clusters

We’ve been organising our own blog site around key topics that matter to us and our potential customers.

You can see the main topic clusters we want to cover on the navigation of our blog here.

https://blog.upscope.com

Does it work? See the proof.

Google for 'Intercom pricing' or 'Intercom emails'.

Intercom is one our topic clusters as we integrate with Intercom and their customers are our customers. You’ll see our blog posts often within the first or second page.

If you're new to topic clusters and maybe even to SEO then we can't recommend this article on SaaS SEO enough.

Pardeep Kullar
Pardeep Kullar

Pardeep overlooks growth at Upscope and loves writing about SaaS companies, customer success and customer experience.