Using Labels

Labels are a single word or a multiple word phrase you can add to the default language version of a specific article in Help Center. You can use labels to influence article search relevance, or to influence Answer Bot results (if you are using Answer Bot).

This article aims to guide you through the concepts of how adding labels on articles improves our customers' user experience when they visit our knowledge bases.

Why Use Labels?

Influencing Article Search Relevance

Adding labels can make your articles more search-friendly. They are not designed to be used for fine-grained control of ranking. For example, if you have two articles about licenses, one with the word "renew" in the body of the article, and one with the label "renew", the labeled article will be ranked higher if a user searches for the word "renew".

Labels are indexed for search with a bit less weight than the article title, but multiple labels with similar words can outweigh the title and body of the article.

Use labels carefully as you can significantly impact the relevance of your search results and usefulness. If you are considering using labels to impact search relevance, consider that efforts to do so could end up with an inferior ranking performance for your users. The best way to have your article perform well in search is to create a short and focused article, where the title and body include keywords and clearly connect to each other. This is enforced by the Knowledge Base Article Quality Bar.

Influencing Answer Bot Results

Answer Bot uses labels to influence the results it shows. It allows you to define a whitelist of articles that are allowed to be used when looking for relevant matching results. You are able to add up to ten labels to Answer Bot that serve as an OR filter, allowing you to expand the whitelist to any articles containing any of the defined labels.

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Best Practices When Using Labels

Labels can help boost the search relevance of an article. However, you should use labels carefully and sparingly. It's more important to make sure the article title and body contain the relevant keywords.

• Use single word labels where possible, instead of multi-word phrases.
• Avoid using labels that are already present in the title and overview.
• Avoid using long phrases as labels to boost an article's ranking with respect to a query.
• Use only nouns and verbs to boost results.
• Do not include variations of the same word, including different tenses or plural forms.
• Do not add more than ten (10) labels onto an article.
  
  Although the number of labels for search is limited to 200, it is prudent not to overload an article with labels. The search engine will use the first 200 labels and ignore any additional labels for each knowledge base.
• Avoid irrelevant keywords that users do not naturally search for.
  
  Use Zendesk Reporting to check users' behavior in searching.
• Publish the article briefly to test out labels and search for an article. If an article is not shown in the first set of results, you need to tweak either your title, overview or labels to boost it.

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External Articles

• Using labels on your Help Center articles
• Optimizing your articles for Answer Bot
• Best Practice: Using labels in Answer Bot triggers

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