How to Organize a Knowledge Base in 7 Steps (With Examples)

If you’re trying to figure out how to organize a knowledge base, you’ve come to the right place! A knowledge base is an invaluable asset for customer suStruggling to organize your knowledge base (KB)? You’re in the right place.

A well-organized knowledge base is a game-changer for customer success teams and end users. But when it’s messy, outdated, or hard to search, it only adds to the chaos.

If you’re constantly updating it manually, digging for information with no results, or still asking teammates how to do things, it’s time to explore how to organize your knowledge base.

According to various reports, workers, on average, spend nearly 20-25% of their day just searching for internal information. A clear, searchable, and structured knowledge base saves time, reduces frustration, and helps customers and your team get answers fast.

Here’s what to focus on:

• Structure
• Content categories and topics
• Keywords and searchability
• Automation tools
• Analytics

With this in mind, let’s dive into the complete guide on how to organize a knowledge base.

What to consider before building your knowledge base

Before you begin building your corporate knowledge base, you need to set the groundwork. Depending on how well you plan and structure it, it’ll be much easier to maintain over time.

Let’s break down the key things to keep in mind.

Overall goal

Clarify why you’re creating a knowledge base. This will shape its structure, tone, and content.

Some questions to help you identify your goal:

• Do you want to reduce support tickets or internal back-and-forth?
• Are you aiming to speed up employee onboarding?
• Is it a customer self-service tool or an internal documentation system?
• Will it be part of a larger content strategy, like boosting your SEO or supporting product education?

With this in mind, you can define a clear goal and go from there.

Software features

If you’re planning to build a knowledge base using third-party tools, evaluate what your knowledge base software needs to support your business as it scales. 

Look for features like AI-powered knowledge base, automatic information updates and management, search functionality, tagging and categorization, analytics, and integrations with other tools like your CRM and communication channels. 

User roles

Define who will use the knowledge base and what level of access they’ll need. You’ll likely have roles like:

• Admins who can manage structure, permissions, and content
• Editors and contributors who write and update articles
• Viewers who can only read content

Activity

Assess how frequently the knowledge base will be updated and by whom. Your best bet is automatic updates with regular and frequent rounds. But the updates also depend on your product. 

For example, a software product with frequent releases will need a living knowledge base that’s regularly updated for optimal SaaS customer service. A static product, like physical hardware, may require fewer updates.

User journey

Understand when and how users interact with the knowledge base throughout their journey. A great way to structure your knowledge repository based on the user journey is to map it in two stages:

1. Pre-sale content about feature comparisons and pricing

2. Post-sale articles about troubleshooting and advanced usage

Intended audience

Your audience will influence tone, content depth, and access settings. Your knowledge base can be internal (for your team), external (for customers), or both. For example, an internal HR knowledge base may include policy documents and onboarding checklists. An external knowledge base for a mobile app might include step-by-step guides with screenshots.

How to organize a knowledge base in 7 steps

Organizing tons of data isn’t an easy job, especially when your company has multiple departments, international branches, and thousands of employees. 

By 2027, 65% of tasks related to data processing and information could be fully automated—making a well-organized knowledge base more essential than ever.

Let’s walk through the seven steps you need to take to get started and sort things out.

Step 1 – Collect the information you want to include

Before creating any structure, gather the most relevant and useful information.

Start by identifying the questions your users, customers, or team members ask most often. For example, a retail company might put order and delivery-related information first to deflect questions like:

• How long does shipping take to X country?
• How much do international shipments cost?
• How many days do I have to return my order?

You can find out what your customers ask most often by reviewing:

• Support tickets
• Customer interviews
• Internal documentation
• Product walkthroughs

Go through these sources manually or use an AI-powered tool to automate the process. Identify the most common questions and then move on to less frequently asked ones. This will help you map out your knowledge base strategically, prioritizing the most important information first.

Step 2 – Create a logical organization system

Design an intuitive layout that allows users to easily find what they need. Group your content into categories, subcategories, and articles. This hierarchy helps users and search tools navigate efficiently.

For example, if we circle back to the retail example, a few possible categories to include are:

• Ordering
• Tracking
• Delivery
• Returns

You can see how fashion giant Zara categorizes its knowledge library into key topics and subtopics to help customers find information faster.

To make it even easier for customers to find and navigate:

• Use familiar terms and avoid jargon when naming your categories
• Limit top-level categories to 5–10 to keep things scannable
• Use subcategories only when they truly enhance clarity

For example, a clear and logical structure of topics would be:

Deliveries — Shipping methods — Article on international shipping 

Step 3 – Choose your contributors

Identify and assign people to create and maintain accurate content.

To choose a well-rounded range of contributors for a customer support knowledge base, include team members who represent every stage of the customer journey and support process to make it as useful and comprehensive as possible.

Some of the main contributors usually include:

• Customer support agents – They know the most common issues, pain points, and how customers typically phrase their problems.
• Support team leads and managers – They provide strategic insights, spot trends in support tickets, and ensure consistency in tone, format, and escalation paths.
• Product teams – They explain technical features accurately, validate solutions, and help clarify complex issues that require deeper product knowledge.
• Customer success managers – They understand onboarding, proactive support, and long-term customer goals, contributing content that reduces churn and increases satisfaction.
• QA specialists – They ensure that content is clear, consistent, and kept up to date with the latest product changes.
• Marketing team and writers – They help align tone of voice and make content user-friendly and brand-consistent.

Step 4 – Write relevant content

Now, it’s time to start creating and managing content for your knowledge base. Unlike your company’s blog, customer support articles should be no longer than necessary. Keep them concise and to the point so that users don’t need to scroll through a lengthy page of irrelevant information. It’s better to create more content pieces covering different questions than to put everything in one place.

Start by developing clear, helpful, and brand-aligned articles. Create guidelines for tone, formatting, and structure to maintain consistency across your knowledge base so multiple writers can achieve the same results. 

A few tips to make your content more valuable: 

• Use short paragraphs and bulleted lists
• Include step-by-step instructions
• Embed visuals like screenshots or GIFs
• Write for the least technical user, unless it’s an advanced topic

Step 5 – Label and tag content

Improve discoverability through consistent metadata. Labeling is essential for managing a knowledge base, as it allows you to easily categorize information so readers can quickly find what they need. Designing a practical labeling system is key. Use labels that make sense and ensure they accurately describe each piece of content.

Use a standard tagging system and avoid over-tagging (3–5 per article is plenty).

Step 6 – Incorporate automation

Use tools to make your KB smarter and more dynamic. Automation is one of the most important aspects of any knowledge base. It saves time by responding to customer queries by providing them with the answers they need quickly and accurately. 

Leverage AI and automation tools such as natural language processing (NLP) to help automate repetitive tasks and improve the customer experience.

For example, Capacity’s Answer Engine® automatically updates your library with the latest information and lets your agents and customers find it instantly through quick prompts. Instead of browsing categories to find answers, they can ask the platform directly and receive instant responses with links to sources.

Step 7 – Track feedback

Continuously improve your KB using analytics and user input. The key to understanding how customers interact with your knowledge base is to track data and use analytics tools. Regularly monitor user behavior, analyze customer feedback, and use this data to improve your knowledge base’s organization over time.

For example, Capacity offers comprehensive analytics to help you see your business and customers from multiple angles.

It lets you know:

• What users are searching for
• Which articles they read and bounce from
• What they rate as helpful or unhelpful

Best practices for organizing a knowledge base

At this point, you might still have questions about how to organize your knowledge base. As the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” so let’s go over real-world examples on how to organize a knowledge base.

Organizing a knowledge base for customer support

The goal of creating a useful and functional knowledge base for customer support is to deflect routine inquiries, reduce escalations to agents, speed up customer service, and support your agents during live interactions with customers.

To achieve all this, your knowledge base has to be up to date, match customer intent, and provide an excellent user experience. Let’s walk through some best practices.

Prioritize the right knowledge

Focus first on FAQs and high-volume issues like password resets, account setup, billing, and product how-tos. You can identify the most common questions by analyzing historical support data, talking to your customer support and sales agents, or even interviewing your customers.
Let’s look at how Ahrefs, an SEO and marketing solution provider, handles knowledge base prioritization. As you can see in the image, they prioritize FAQs and list the categories below based on what their customers search for most.

Build a customer-centric structure

Use broad categories like “Getting started,” “Troubleshooting,” and “Billing.” Each category should include short, goal-driven articles. Make the articles skimmable and embed visual elements like graphs, screenshots, and videos to make it easy for users to solve problems on their own.

Hostinger, a web hosting provider, is another great example on how to organize a knowledge base. As you can see in the images, they categorize their customer support-facing knowledge base based on the most common customer inquiries, like “Getting started,” “Domains,” and others. 

Once you click a category, you’ll find relevant articles organized into subtopics like “Access and Order Setup,” “Purchasing a Hosting Plan,” and more. In their knowledge base articles, Hostinger uses screenshots and clear formatting to help users solve their problems faster without additional help. Throughout the customer journey, users can always access the search feature and relevant articles.

Use analytics and customer feedback to improve

Keeping your customer-facing knowledge base up to date is key. But you should also update it based on user experience. For example, if you have one category listed at the top of your knowledge base but customers don’t click on it, perhaps it’s not necessary or isn’t helpful.

To identify the cause, use analytics tools to learn which categories and articles customers click on the most. Another helpful tactic is asking customers to leave feedback.

Let’s circle back to Hostinger. At the end of every support article, they include a simple feedback form in the shape of emojis. If most customers click the smiley face, it suggests they’re happy with the explanation. If they click the sad emoji, it indicates the information isn’t solving the problem. 

How to organize a knowledge base in the workplace

The goal of creating an internal knowledge base for employees is to help them find information faster, speed up onboarding, and simplify basic operations like vacation requests.

Let’s look at some of the best practices for organizing an internal support knowledge base.

Serve multiple departments

If you’re creating a knowledge base for multiple departments, create separate sections for each.

Include sections for:

• HR: This part of the knowledge base should include onboarding checklists, benefits, leave policies, and other information relevant to the department.
• IT: Your IT team should be able to use a knowledge library to find information about access requests, software how-tos, and more.
• Marketing and sales: Your repository also helps the marketing and sales teams familiarize themselves with brand guidelines, audience insights, product specifics, and templates.
• Customer support: The business repository should also help your customer support team access the latest product and process updates, customer information, and procedures like refunds and deliveries (depending on your business model). Including your customer support teams is especially valuable when building a call center knowledge base.

Keep ownership clear—each department should manage its own area. 

Prioritize recurring needs

It takes time to build a comprehensive business knowledge base. To get started, prioritize the most repetitive processes that your knowledge base can automate. For example, it can speed up new employee onboarding. 

Think of your KB as a virtual onboarding buddy—what would a new hire need in their first 90 days? Include recurring tasks: requesting time off, booking a meeting room, and accessing internal tools.

Make content searchable

Many companies choose to keep their employee-facing knowledge bases simple. However, you can make your job much easier by using advanced automation. 

For example, Capacity uses multiple automation options for its internal support platform. Employees can get answers through an AI-powered chatbot or interact with the Answer Engine®. 

It replies with concise and direct answers instead of sending full articles. Say a new hire wants to know the company’s vacation policy. Instead of pinging an HR representative, they can just ask the Answer Engine® and move on.

Protect access 

Not all content on your internal knowledge base should be accessible to everyone. Set permissions for sensitive documents, such as finance or legal policies. If you organized the content based on departments, it’s easier to set access roles and rules. For example, finance policies could be accessible only to the finance and legal departments.

It’s time to get organized

An organized business knowledge base lets you find information faster, use it more often, and help more people. But as you can understand, it’s not always the easiest task. 

Here’s a quick recap:

The first steps on how to organize a knowledge base:

• Collect the information you want to include
• Create a logical organization system
• Choose your contributors
• Write relevant content
• Label and tag knowledge
• Incorporate automation
• Track feedback

Choosing the right knowledge base platform can help you achieve all this and more. If you’re looking for an easier way to centralize your business data and turn it into a search engine, you can’t skip Capacity.

Features like:

• Automated knowledge base
• Low-code building tools
• Advanced AI functionality 
• Analytics and insights

And many more features await you. Book a demo to try the platform for yourself!

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