Learning how to promote and improve the discoverability of your documentation is just as important, if not more important than, writing or improving a piece of documentation itself. If a piece of documentation can’t be found, it has the same value as documentation that doesn’t exist: zero value.

There’s a bias, of course, towards the type of documentation. For example, documentation that explains a new feature will likely be found and read because it’s a core part of a product experience. Conversely, documentation that explains ancillary but important information, whatever it may be, is less likely to be found. For this type of documentation, it’s important to spend time thinking about your documentation strategy.

Here are some example questions to ask yourself:

• How will you promote this documentation?
• Where do you expect readers will look for this information?
• How important is it that readers read and understand the information?
• Should this documentation be read on day one?

And some more, perhaps, advanced questions:

• Can you control the search experience?
• And: What queries do you expect readers will type when looking for the page?
• Can you control the page’s metadata?
• And: Is the page title reflective of the queries that may lead readers to the page?