Content tags are words or short phrases that you can add to articles or community posts to group and connect different types of content, making it easy for your users to quickly find related content across their help centers. You can use article settings to add content tags to individual articles, or you can use the central content tag management page to create and add content tags to articles or to manage existing content tags. You cannot add content tags in bulk.
Unlike labels, which improve search relevance and are used as search keywords, content tags are not searchable nor do they boost search relevance. Instead, content tags let content authors manually create collections of related content across different sections, topics, and content types. End users can click the content tag displayed on an article or post to open a search page for that content collection. They can click the links within each collection to quickly find the information they need in your help center, regardless of where the content sits in your content hierarchy.
Before you can use content tags, you must download the latest Copenhagen theme or update your custom theme to enable content tags. See Getting started with content tags.
What are content tags and how are they used?
Content tags are descriptive terms that you can assign to articles and posts to group them by a common attribute. When you add a content tag to an article or community post, that tag appears in the Related to section at the bottom of the article or post. Users can click the tag to view a search page displaying all other content in your help center with the same tag. You can use up to 25 content tags per article (see Guide product limits for your help center).
For example, this image shows an article with three assigned tags: federated search, API, and search crawler.
When the article is published, the content tags appear as clickable links under the Related to section of the article.
Users can click the content tags to open a search results page that shows all help center content with the same tag.
Content tags in multi-brand help centers
Content tags are created and maintained at the account level. This means if you have multiple help center brands, you can create content tags in one place and use them in articles across all of your help centers. However, the way in which end users can view these content tags in your various brands differs based on your plan.
Guide Professional and below
Help centers created in Professional or Growth plans will only display articles that share content tags within a single brand.
For example, let’s assume you configured a “Getting Started” content tag for your account and want to use it for all getting started articles in both of your help center brands. You can assign that tag to getting started articles across both of your help center brands, but end users will only see the tagged articles for the help center brand they are in.
Guide Enterprise
Because content tag search behavior aligns with help center search, the way in which it functions differs, depending on your plan. Specifically, since multi-brand search is only available for Guide Enterprise, content tag searching across brands is also only available on Enterprise plans.
Let’s take a look at the previous example. With an Enterprise plan, you can configure a “Getting Started” content tag for your account and apply it to all getting started articles across both of your help center brands. This ensures that your content tags are configured correctly, but now you must also configure your search settings to let users search across one or more of your help centers. You can decide which help centers to include in the search results and whether to include community content from those help centers. See Multiple help center search and Enabling search across multiple help centers.
If you configure your search settings to let users see search results across multiple help centers, they can select a content tag and view articles from both help centers with that tag. If you don't allow users to see results across both brands, it won’t matter that you’ve tagged all articles with the same tag. Users will still only be able to view articles within the brand they are currently in.
Getting started with content tags
If you have never used content tags before, here are some considerations and possible theme updates to make before you begin.
- (If necessary) Download the latest Copenhagen theme or update your custom theme to enable content tags. Content tags are available by default in standard themes and themes that were customized after October 19, 2022. If your help center was created before October 19, 2022 and uses a customized theme, you need to update your custom theme to use content tags.
- Enable content tagging for your community. By default, content tagging on community posts is disabled, meaning that end users cannot add content tags to their posts. If content tags have been applied to posts or articles, end users will still be able to see and click those tags on published content, but they cannot add them. When content tagging on community posts is enabled, end users can view and apply any content tag in your application to their community post. Before you enable content tags on your community content, make sure that you approve of all community users viewing and using the content tags you define. To allow end users to apply content tags to posts see Allowing users to add content tags to community posts.
- Understand who has permission to create, add, and remove content tags. Guide admins and article authors can create content tags in articles. Only Guide admins and agents can create content tags in community posts.
Best practices for using content tags
The following best practices explain how to make the most out of using content tags to streamline your end user experience:
- Naming - When you write an article or post, try to think about what main ideas, concepts, features, or products it covers. Content tags are intended to simplify search, so when you create a tag, ask yourself if this name can be understood and reused by others. It also helps to use short names. Content tags are case insensitive so if you have a content tag titled “test” then you cannot call a new tag “TEST”.
- Limit content tags: Although it is possible to add up to 25 tags to an article or post, you should only use 5 to 7 content tags. The purpose of content tags is to surface related content across your help center and community. If you place too many content tags on an article or post, it will be cluttered and difficult to use.
- Keep tags current: Review content tags once in a while, look for spelling and grammar mistakes, duplication, and low usage. You can easily fix mistakes by updating the name of a tag. For tags with low usage, it is important to check if a name is meaningful and understood by others. In this case, consider renaming or even removing a content tag.
- Merging content tags: Resolve errors in tag names or remove duplicate tags by merging content tags. For example, if you have two content tags named "content tag" and "content_tag", you can merge the incorrect tag into the correct tag. When you merge a tag, content associated with the merged tag is added to the tag you are merging into. The merged tag is then deleted from your account. See Managing content tags.
38 comments
Laura
Hey,
First of all, thank you for adding this very helpful feature!
Second, I have a question: How do these tags react in multilingual Help Centers? Can we add different tags to different translations of an article? Or will the tags always appear in the default language, even when viewing the article in a different language than the default one?
I'm just curious to know how the tags will adjust (or not) to different languages.
Thank you in advance!
2
Arianne Batiles
Hi Laura,
The content tags in Guide will be applied to articles on the article level, not on the translation level. Yes, the tags will appear the same when viewing the article in a different language.
0
Monica
The focus on singular language for the content tag and therefore needing to create new tags for each language makes this a bit less useful. Would love to see labels and content tags have translation management at a Guide wide level. As well as being able to manage for user misspellings.
0
Miki Kanomata
Hi,
Where can I find the information about See the "Enabling content tags in your theme" section of the Help center templating cookbook? I tried to find the section, but couldn't.
Thanks!
1
kit
Hello,
In our kb we've been using Labels to 'tag' articles. How is this functionality different to labels please, and what is the suggested optimal use for Labels vs Related to content tags? Thanks!
2
Elizabeth Williams
Hi Miki Kanomata,
You can find the information in the Adding content tags to articles and posts section within the Help center templating cookbook.
Thanks!
2
Arianne Batiles
Hi kit,
Content tags do not influence search relevance and cannot be used as a search keyword. This feature provides an alternative grouping that allows you to create a shared theme across different sections, topics, and content types.
For example, when we have an article regarding refunds, you may want to add labels such as refund, returns, etc. to improve the search experience. Then, to categorize your articles, you can add a content tag such as "billing".
3
Rita Stieģele
Hi!
How/where we could find code to add code to our theme to enable content tags?
Thanks!
/Rita
3
Aya
Hi!
Is there a way to edit or delete the tags that are added by mistake? Since they are end-user facing, I want to make it look nicer - for example, there is a tag "zendesk" but want to change it to "Zendesk".
Thanks!
0
Kasper Sørensen
Hi Aya
Yes if you go to "Guide Admin -> Arrange -> Manage content tags" then you can click a content tag and rename it in the side-panel to the right.
2
Mary Paez
Questions/Concerns on Content tags:
Content tags is a great way for our customers to find a group of related articles in the KB. But, we have some concerns.
1) How many content tags can be created in the overall list of content tags?
2) Is there a way to view all content tags (we want to remove any that are misspelled or unused)? We need to have a UI to manage this and not have to use the API!
3) Is there a bulk action to apply selected content tags to a group of documents?
4) Is there a way to transfer article labels to become content tags in a group of documents?
5) Using Explore, is there a way to report on all documents and get the list of content tags on those documents?
6) Is there a way in Explore to find all documents that have a particular content tag?
3
Allison Sargent
Same question as Rita...we have a custom theme so where's the code/recipe to enable this manually? Thanks!
0
Kasper Sørensen
Hi Mary Paez
As always some excellent questions. I'll try my best to answer and hope your concerns go away.
1
Kasper Sørensen
Hi Allison Sargent
You can find custom theme instructions in our theming cookbook, the new section Adding content tags to articles and posts.
1
Mary Paez
Wow! Thank you Casper for the Arrange Content --> Content tags UI so we can better manage them.
QUESTION: When do you come out with a similar one for Labels???? (LOL)
Another enhancement request is to offer a way to export those content tags into a csv or excel file. Same with Guide admin when you get a list of documents (this has been a request for quite some time).
Management of articles/content/labels/updates is important. So, #5 is for management purposes. I will get requests from our coaches and KDEs and sometimes Managers. It is giving them the flexibility to manage their content.
QUESTION: Will you be extending the 200 content tag limit? We see a big need for using these but we have many products and they are all very different in the medical field (sales/marketing vs patient vs healthcare provider) so we see for different products we might need more. We use an Explore "Search" report to list search criteria. This helps us determine what words/phrases customers are using to find out content. Some of these terms are used for content tags.
2
Kasper Sørensen
Hi Mary Paez
Regarding converting a label to a content tag, we've gone ahead and created an example script that uses our API to do this. You can read the README and download the script on GitHub!
We don't plan to create a central management UI for labels. I can try and explain a bit ... I think that once you start using content tags you will see that it is starting to also clarify the future purpose of labels. Over time we are likely going to rename labels into "Search keywords" or something like that, because that's what it will be: A search keyword booster. Of course you will still also be able to create internal article lists based on labels/keywords. But for end-user facing lists and filters, it will be content tags. This also means that in the space of keywords you'll see less central management and more adhoc SEO-style optimization of the individual pieces of content.
Regarding the 200 tag limit: I do think we can extend this limit. We introduced it to shape customer behaviour a bit. Think about the fact that this will be a public-facing tag list. It's likely that your end users can't comprehend it if it gets too big.
0
Matthias Miltenberger
Content tags are pretty cool but we stumbled upon a small issue that could be addressed: The list of possible tags to select from only shows the first 20 entries and it is not clear that there are more. You could either show all tags when clicking on the chevron/arrow or add a visual clue or simply a note implying that there are more and people are just supposed to start typing. This is not obvious.
0
Kelsey Davis
Thanks for this, where would I see low or high usage of the content tags?
And also to add on to Mary Paez question about the limit of tags and your response Kasper Sorensen :
Is this the case if we have multibrand? Is it 200 per brand then? I will need much more than 200.
0
Patrick
I've implemented the new Copenhagen theme on our knowledge center and the behavior on our pages is as you describe when being logged in.
If you are not logged in the text (<p> tag in html) "Related to" is NOT displaying. The tags itself (with the link) are present.
Is this "normal behavior"? I'd expect the text "Related to" to be present in any case (logged in or not)
Regards
0
Tetiana Gron
Hello,
Regarding the limits it is 200 content tags per account.
We are working on fixing missing "Related to" text. It will be above content tags on all article and post pages.
0
Mary Paez
We have to hold off on using content tags at this time since we can not restrict who can add them to our articles. We have a designated team of KCS coaches that came up with the list of tags and want to add them to articles. However, what prevents us from using it is that anyone can go in and add/remove them. We want to control the list of tags that appear on the portal and don't want to have any incorrect tags appear on our portal.
Does Zendesk have plans to restrict the management of content tags to a designated group of users (eg: KCS coaches, content team, admins only)???
0
Tetiana Gron
Hi Mary Paez,
Thank you for your feedback. Only agents with publishing permissions can add or remove content tags from articles. It works similar to labels, you can check labels permissions in Creating management permissions to define agent editing and publishing rights
At the same time only admins can access content tags management where they can remove content tags from your Zendesk instance or merge few into one.
0
shelley
Is there any plans to add Content Tags to the Zendesk ROLE theme? As a default content tags are not shown in this theme, which is kinda weird considering it is a Zendesk theme. This theme also does not permit code editing, which is annoying, so cannot even add the code to the theme.
2
Mary Paez
I am trying to rename a content tag from "approved email" to "Approved Email". but I get an error.
In order to do this I have to 1)delete the tag and 2) recreate it. However, all the docs tagged with that content tag will have the old one removed. Seems an "EDIT" function should allow us to change the case of the tag but it is not allowing it very easily. Any idea why?
Am able to rename "claim" to "Claims". Does this mean it updated all the articles it is added to?
1
Elizabeth Williams
Hi Mary Paez - The merge content tags feature allows you to create a new tag (for example "Approved Email"), and then merge the old tag (for example "approved email") with the new one. When you merge content tags, the original content tag is deleted and content associated with it is moved to the merged tag. You can read about this in Managing content tags (Merging).
0
Tanya
Hi,
I have a question. When I click on a content tag, the page loads with a title "n results for "" in All Categories".
Could you please advise why it's not showing the tag in the quotes, and just empty quotes? Is this a bug or do I need to change anything in the theme?
Thank you!
Here's a screenshot:
0
Tetiana Gron
Hi Tanya,
Could you please open a ticket with Zendesk so we can look at your particular case?
0
Tanya
Hi Tetiana Gron
Thank you. I have now. Will try to resolve this with the support.
0
Madeleine
If an end user is trying to locate an article containing a word such as "troubleshooting" but accidentally enters "truoubleshooting" and misspells the word, the results will display 0 articles.
Is there a way to create tags or something similar to enable articles to display even if the word is misspelled? Best practice would allow the search results to pick up anything containing the desired word, even if there is a typo.
0
Tetiana Gron
Hi Madeleine,
I think your question is about labels and not content tags. You can add a label "truoubleshooting" to the article so then it is a match of the word that is not part of the actual article. We are also working on making search smarter so in future the search will recognize misspelling and will suggest results for the right word.
1