Your Site Visitors Get That Your Content Is Important, Do You?

June 16, 2010 | by Carrie Hane Dennison | Posted in Web Content

When people ask me what I do and I tell them “content for websites,” they almost always respond with “that’s very important.” Yet so many websites pay so little attention to their content. Content is usually something that just gets moved from the current site or holds up the launch of the great-looking new site because it’s not ready.

The design is inevitably the high point. Yet the prettiest design in the world isn’t going to get someone to act, motivate someone to donate, educate or inform someone on a topic, or tell them what time your store opens.

There are several ways to find out what your visitors want. None of them involves guessing or making assumptions. With just a little time and money, you can get a huge return on investment for your site.

1. Look at your analytics – what are your most popular pages? What pages have the highest bounce rate? What are the most common referral keywords? What are the most commonly searched keywords on the site search?

   The answers to all these questions can help you focus on the top few pages and optimize them for best use.

2. Do some user testing – before even starting your redesign process, test your current site with as few as three users to find out is most in need of improvement. This will take as few as three hours to do and reward you greatly in the end. Keep those points in mind as you go forward.
3. Ask your receptionist (or whoever answers the phones) what the most commonly asked questions are. Focus your energy on the pages that answer those questions – as well as the path to get to those pages. No, don’t make these into a FAQ (frequently asked questions) page!
4. Look at your competitors. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Look at your competitors’ sites and see what they are doing well. Have they set up the menu in a way that makes it easy for visitors to find what they need? Do they provide a tool that lets visitors easily get the answers they seek? Then you should too!

   By contrast, if your competitors aren’t doing anything particularly well, you have a chance to really shine.

5. Take your cue from the most popular websites. Amazon does any amazing job of upselling products with their recommendations. Yahoo! provides top news at a glance. The BBC writes short and compelling headlines. Even though you might not have the web budgets these companies have, you do have the power to follow the standards and examples they provide. Remember you are competing not only with other sites that might offer similar information, but all the websites people visit on a regular basis.

So, as you think about your website, keep in mind that these things are as important (or more important) than visualizing what colors you want on your site or what CMS you should use. In the end, your visitors will remember if informaiton was easy or frustrating to find. And that impression will reflect on your entire business.

Have the website people remember for being so easy to use that they’ll return to it again and again.