When we talk about design, it’s typically through a visual lens: we design the aesthetic experience of a website or a company’s logo. In the age of big data, however, it’s also possible to use analytic feedback to design your web content. By drawing on knowledge of prior content and customer response to your site, your business can improve its performance with intelligent, data-driven content design. It’s a whole new way of thinking about creation and development.
Read your customers
The first step to designing your web content is to gain an understanding of what’s working. For example, pages with scannable content typically perform better than those with highly detailed posts, because users don’t have the patience to read word-by-word. They want to get the gist of the post without digging too deep.
Similarly, customers also respond better to pages featuring video content (up to a certain limit). Surprisingly, companies see maximum conversions at a video length of about 20 seconds, but many users will tune in for up to a minute. It’s all about determining where your conversion-to-bounce balance is and modifying your web content around that.
Related: Turn Your Content Into a 7-Figure Business
Monitor content relevance
In general, there are two parts to every website: the popular content that’s referenced regularly and performs well in search results, and the dead pages that no one uses. However, there’s more of that dead content than you might think.
According to B2B marketing experts Socedo, the useless content is 65 percent of your site, on average.
It’s easy to miss these pages when running an analytics assessment on your site, but if you perform a page-by-page breakdown, you can see page use trends in action and evolution. By finding and eliminating the old or low-use web content, you can help improve site performance and identify what topics your company should focus on right now.
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Design web content around a goal
It’s difficult to design site content if you don’t have a clear goal in mind. Do you want to increase conversions? Improve your SEO score? By establishing a business goal and then breaking that goal down into smaller steps, you’ll set yourself up for success.
As part of laying out these smaller goals in your content redesign, your business should create a content calendar with titles or topics for each post. This prevents your posts from deviating from your plan and derailing you from your goal.
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Partner with your tech
Whether you’re a solopreneur or a startup with a team, you’re never in this work alone; you’re consistently partnered with your clients, your professional allies, and even your technology as you seek to advance in the marketplace and provide better service. That’s why it’s so important to have intimate knowledge of your technology, its capacities, and the working data if you want to succeed.
With the rise of machine learning, for example, AI systems are able to continually tap into your website and interpret customer behavior. This “deep learning” process can provide your business with insights into how your customers use the website, where they click, or why they leave. Traditional analytics systems spit out numbers, but AI can contextualize that information.
Ultimately, web content design is the data-driven sibling of content strategy. The goals are very similar: to enhance business performance and make your site more useful to customers. Analytics is the 21st century answer to a long-standing problem, and can make your job as an entrepreneur easier if you let it.
