5 content issues that must guide the redesign of your website
"There are many things to consider when you decide to redesign your website and there are even more people who would like to be involved when this happens."
So Lisa Barone (Search Engine Watch), presents the framework of the experts: the designers want to integrate a better user experience, developers want to upgrade technology for mobile devices, while your SEO team would like to keep intact as much as possible, placements achieved.
But this is not all: there are also issues of "content" to be addressed before you remodel your website. Here are the five most important issues chosen by Baron:
1. What is the existing content, right now, on your site?
It seems a very simple question that requires an answer and just as easy, but, depending on the age and size of your site, it might not be.
If you do not know what you have already, during the redesign you accidentally lose valuable resources, or waste money creating duplicates or not take the opportunity to publish something that your audience has shown their appreciation.
As part of your time to do an inventory and verification of quality of all the content you've put together from the beginning: web pages, blog posts, articles, ebooks, videos, case studies, PDF and image together to their approval rating (e.g. Number of like).
Once you know what you have, you can look for what you lack.
- What do not you have that may be of benefit to your customers, your sales force or your fans?
- What kind of information seeking more often? What questions do you parse?
Take note of everything for an evaluation of whether to incorporate this new content in the new redesign.
2. What kind of content brings revenues?
- In almost all cases of redesigning a business site, you must also carry out an update "minimum" of content.
- This means to add, edit or delete pages that do not offer anything to your customers.
- How to find out what are the pages with the highest and lowest?
- This does not have to guess, but derive it from your Analytics data.
Track user behavior on an e-commerce, assigning a value to each conversion obtained, it might help you understand what the pages with higher profitability: i.e. those that users value most (and where they make more purchases).
Forget those who already work and focused only on those pages with the lowest values of traffic and conversions. If between these there are also pages with quality content, it is pages that may still have a potential traffic, if redesigned correctly.
Reports on landing pages (landing page), you can acquire through Google Analytics, let you know the origin of the traffic by showing where people "land" more frequently and the sites from which they come.
Find the entry points and a judgment on the quality of the landing page: think then how could you improve it. The CTA (Call To Action) may be, for example, refined on the origin of the traffic.
Essentially Barone argues that we should not create new content, if you do not know what we already works (or does not work): in this way can optimize the time to devote to "informed" decisions.
3. They work your current CTA?
Before laying the foundations for a new site, it is better to have a better understanding of how your visitors are moving inside the current one: where your communication works and where your "calls to action" (CTAs) are wasted.
Again are the Analytics data that can help you identify areas where your site gets better performance and where it is losing ground instead. You must use this data to comply with sections that need to be strengthened: it is the removal of an obstacle, the update of the CTAs or finding behavioral factors.
Baron recommends using the ' Analysis In-Page, between the ratios of standard GA (or, in the new version, the last entry of the group behavior), to get a general picture of the interaction of users to your website. The analysis can give you this information:
a) How many clicks occur in the second half of the page?
b) The users are clicking on the CTA or the main message is not going to sign?
c) Users can see the important elements of the content?
Here's an example of the analysis of GA with ' Chrome extension, Page Analytics :
A similar mechanism also offers the CrazyEgg through a heat map (heat maps) that help to understand how users interact, providing a lot of data on the click and behavior.
When you redesign your site, you must ensure that all adjustments will be to the benefit of the reader.
4. What information is missing or what they need to be updated?
So how do you want to know what works, you want to know even what is not working.
Observe the log of an internal search engine to your site, allows you to intercept what your users are looking for and with their own words.
They're looking at that particular product, in this moment, is not present?
Or maybe the product is present, but it is not placed in an appropriate category. Or maybe even user searches reveal a problem with the structure of the navigation and the names "conventional" you used.
If you can identify these problems, not repeat them during the redesign.
5. Content of support to the objective of your site?
Now take a step back and ask yourself: what's the goal of my website? The content is presented guiding visitors towards the end result? Your content provides support for what the site is trying to achieve? It could be a matter of communication, but it could also be a structural problem. Check the architecture of your site and how users are guided through its contents. And a logical process, or users tend to get lost? The information is presented in the appropriate order and for the right users? Analyze the flow of your visit of a user to see how many clicks or steps it takes to get to what interests them. A visitor should not take more than three clicks to get on an important content. Check the items in your main navigation: provide a proper list of the contents of the site? You can use data analytics and heat maps to understand how your customers navigate your site. Alternatively, you can hire someone who has never visited your site, provide an objective and observe how many steps does to achieve it. Take advantage also for asking him if he understands the topic of your site, its purpose and what it asks visitors.
Thorough review of your content and defining strategies and results, writes Baron, you will be able to provide much of the information that an agency should look at the initial stage of the project.