Content and User Experience
The content is a crucial element of just about every page online, and it can make or break the user experience for many visitors.
That’s why companies need to start thinking about their content marketing strategy in terms of the user experience and making all of their content as accessible and user-friendly as possible.
Expectations
Any low-quality content is automatically going to be considered as poor content in terms of user experience because it doesn’t prioritize the audience. However, in terms of content, poor user experience can mean different things.
There are plenty of different ways that companies can evaluate or even define the quality of their content.
There is the length of the content, its readability, and clarity, its depth, as well as the comprehensiveness, and yet all of those things still don’t really explain what poor copy might mean for the audience.
The reason for that is that the quality of content is to be quite subjective.
What one person might think is poor copy could be a perfectly well-written piece of content that explains the basic elements of a subject for a person that’s not that familiar with that same topic.
That’s why the best way that companies can define poor copy is from the perspective of their target audiences. That means a high-quality website copy is going to be any copy that’s able to cater to the search intent of the website visitors and meet their expectations.
Search Intent
There are different ways for companies to figure out if the content they’re creating for their website is fulfilling the needs of their target audiences and catering to their intent.
One of those things is to clearly define the target audience of the piece of content so that when the contact is being created it can better relate to the needs of that audience.
This strategy can be taken a step further by companies when they start creating segments of the target audience and figuring out different characteristics that they have in common.
Then, the company should figure out which problems the segmented audience is facing on a daily basis and the reason why they decided to turn to search engines to use that specific search query and find some answers.
To better understand how companies target an audience, companies should be constantly communicating with their customer service teams, as well as creating surveys and conducting interviews with members of the target audience to ask them questions directly.
Clues from Google
Companies can also keep an eye on search engines like Google and see which search elements are showing up for their queries, and learn more about the people that are using those queries.
For example, Google frequently has video carousels or a “People Also Ask” section in the search results, that companies can use to learn more about the search intent of their audience.
Additionally, companies can also learn more about what search engines present to users when using specific queries by looking at the results themselves.
For instance, one query can show that most of the results that show up provide very basic answers to searchers, which means if a business wants to rank higher for that keyword and cater to the needs of those searchers, it should start creating that type of content.
UX and Content Marketing
One of the key elements to the success of a company’s business website is the user experience of the content that’s shared on that website.
No matter how great the content that a company is creating and sharing might be, it’s not going to be performing well if website visitors have a difficult time engaging with it or reading through it.
That’s why it’s important for companies to optimize their content strategy by structuring their content and removing any page elements that are too distracting.
Structured content
Every piece of content that a company creates should be well-organized using headings, visual elements, lists, and more.
These organizational elements can help companies make their content a lot more user-friendly.
When companies use subheadings, they improve the readability of the content since readers will have a much easier time scanning through a piece of content to decide if the entire piece is going to be helpful to solving their problem.
By making the subheadings clearly visible, companies can improve their engagement rates because they’ll be prompting the website visitors to stop their scrolling and instead, read sections of the content that’s going to be relevant to their interests or needs.
This kind of organization in content makes it a lot easier for readers to follow through with it and remember what they’ve seen, and it boosts accessibility because the people that navigate websites using screen readers will also have an easier time understanding all of the content.
That’s why companies should be breaking down their content into shorter paragraphs and adding subheadings that are both relevant to the content and visually different from the rest of it, and they can even take it a step further by creating a table of contents that the website visitors can click on to quickly navigate between different parts of the copy.
Additionally, companies can also break their keyword lists down into groups by their meaning, which is also called keyword clustering, as another way to rank their content for multiple keywords on search engines, while still creating a logical structure in the copy.
Page Elements
No matter how great the content of a page might be, if that page is full of distracting page elements, it’s not going to be engaging to the website visitors.
There are plenty of ways that companies can figure out if they have redundant, confusing, or distracting elements on their pages, with a popular one being Clarity, which was created by Bing.
By using this tool, companies can get an additional reliable source of website data that generates detailed insights, as well as better understand which elements on their pages aren’t working properly for the website visitors.
In fact, this tool has several other engagement solutions for companies to use and experiment with to improve their on-page engagement with website visitors. Another important factor that companies have to keep in mind when tiring to improve the user experience of their website visitors is the loading speed of their websites.
Companies that want to find out if their pages have any issues with performance can use Google’s Search Console which alerts businesses whenever there are any issues.
Co-CEO at 5W Public Relations, Dara Busch oversees 5W’s Consumer PR Practice, which includes Travel & Entertainment, Apparel & Accessories, Non-Profits, Home & Housewares, Health & Wellness, Mom & Baby, Beauty & Grooming, and Consumer Packaged Goods.