Content Design
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By the end of your discovery you will have:
● your online audience’s view
● your experts’ views
● some idea of missing information (this will have come from your experts’ anecdotes)
● your organisation’s current view (your current info or business goals if you have them)
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Finding your
audience through
research
People who are new to web publishing tend to think their audience are out there, patiently waiting for someone to write something that will interest them.
Too often, they assume that all they need to do is put something online and it will be findable, and found, by the right people. It doesn’t work like that.
If you want your content to succeed, you need to find your audience. You have to understand:
● who your audience really are
● what they want from you
● and how to speak to them
… before you write a single word.
Your audience
are humans
In the old days, when good search engines (particularly Google) were still the new exciting things on the web, people used to do what’s called keyword stuffing (putting a lot of keywords on a page, sometimes many
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times). The search engines would pick up those words, assume that page was more relevant, and push it up the rankings.
Today that sort of behaviour will get you blacklisted (disregarded) by search engines very quickly. If there’s one thing the makers of search engines don’t like, it’s people trying to game the system. So they’ve made it very hard to do that. Successful content doesn’t even try to game the system; it wins by just being good content.
So you need to write your content for humans, not search engines. Good content and natural language will get you further up the rankings than any attempt at trickery. (There’s one exception: paid-for adver-tisements, but that’s beyond the scope of this book.
There’s stacks of information out there on how to make the most of your keyword budget. Before you run off and buy a load of them, remember: humans are often sceptical of ads and will usually just go to the first search result that’s clearly not an advert.) Of course, you know your product or service, and you know your organisation. Does that mean you automatically know what to say to your audience?
Maybe. But maybe not.
The thing with prior knowledge is that it colours your judgement.
Who are you talking to? Who do you really want to come
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to your site? How well do you really know them? For some people you’ll know this. For others, you’ll think you know this.
If you’ve worked in your organisation for a while, you’ll have a good measure of who those humans are. But don’t forget that people change their habits along with the technology they use. Do you really know your audience as of right now – or as of a few years ago?
If you are new to an organisation, then so much the better. You don’t have any preconceived ideas. Don’t let this be daunting. It can be a plus, not a minus.
The best way to get to know your audience is to have user researcher on the team. User researchers are professionals whose entire job is to really understand users, and to help the rest of the team understand what needs those users have. They will do this through lots of different research techniques including interviews, surveys and analysis.
Not all organisations see the value in this kind of research, and some don’t want to pay someone to do it. If you are in this position, you can still do some desk research to better understand your users. It’s not as good as having a user researcher, but it’s better than doing nothing.
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Introducing
Nice Green
Energy
All the way through this book, we are going to pretend you are a content person working for a UK-based company called Nice Green Energy. Not everything works the way you’d like it to (because in most organisations, that’s what happens).
You’re working in a team of 4 content designers based in one office, working alongside the web team. Your marketing and brand team are based in another office about 100 miles away.
You have to work with them on all your digital content, but you don’t see them often. They have sign-off control, you don’t.
Throughout the book, we’re going to frame content design problems using examples from Nice Green Energy. That way, you can see the process as it moves from one step to the next, and see how different parts of the process relate to one another.
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Finding your audience’s vocabulary The words you use inside your organisation aren’t always the same as the words that people outside it would use to describe the same thing.
Task number one is to find out what vocabulary your audience is using.
As a content designer at Nice Green Energy, you have been asked to look at a section of the company website that deals with hydraulic fracturing (bear with me here).
The page is failing on your website – traffic data shows that no one visits it, even though the subject is always in the news, and your company (alongside many others in the sector) has been attacked by the media for your policy on hydraulic fracturing.
So what do you do?
You could start with the people in the company who know most about it and get a brief from them. For example, many companies have brand guidelines that will tell you who the audience is and what they are coming to you for. Sometimes these guidelines are based in Case study
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research, sometimes they are not. The latter is quite dangerous for you as a content designer.
If there’s no insight leading you to your style, tone of voice and intended audience, you may find that no matter how hard you try, your content fails. Mostly because it will be doing what the organisation wants, and not what your audience wants.
So first of all, find what your audience is saying with some desk research. You can get a stack of research done without moving too far from your actual desk.
Search data
Search data means the words people type into a search engine to get information on the web.
‘External’ search data refers to trends from places like Google, while ‘internal’ search data refers to what users enter into the search bar on your website.
External searches happen on other people’s websites, and bring users to yours; internal searches happen on your website, conducted by users who have already found it.
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Here, we’re focusing on external data, because it tells us how users seek information before they come to you, so you can do a better job attracting them. When looking into this for the first time, don’t start with internal data – go external, where your audience is. They have all the answers you need right now.
Google Trends will help you find some of the language you are looking for.
Google hides a lot of data and if your audience chooses to search privately or incognito, you won’t find all the data you are looking for. However, you will be able to make a very good start.
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Worldwide
2004 - present
All categories
Web search
Compare Search terms
hydraulic fracturing
+ term
Search term
Interest over time
F
G
E D C B
I
A
H
2005
2007
2009
2011
2013
2015
You might start by putting ‘hydraulic fracturing’ into Google Trends, which would get you something like this.
There’s some traffic – but on closer inspection, you can see it’s from 2004 and it’s for the entire world. You only care about the UK right now. So let’s add filters for UK-only and the last month.
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United Kingdom
Past 30 days
All categories
Web search
Compare Search terms
hydraulic fracturing
+ term
Search term
Interest over time
Not enough search volume to show graphs.
Suggestions:
• Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
• Try different search terms.
• Try more general search terms.
• Try fewer search terms.
• Try searching data for all years and all regions.
There are so few searches now that nothing’s showing up. Maybe that’s why people aren’t finding your page of information. So let’s back up a bit. Let’s look over the last year.
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United Kingdom
Past 12 months
All categories
Web search
Compare Search terms
hydraulic fracturing
+ term
Search term
Interest over time
Jan 2015
Apr 2015
Jul 2015
Oct 2015
Now it’s clear: in Oct 2015, the term ‘hydraulic fracturing’ completely dropped off the chart.
It’s so low, Google isn’t tracking it now.
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United Kingdom
Past 12 months
All categories
Web search
Compare Search terms
hydraulic fracturing
fracking
+ term
Search term
Search term
Interest over time
Jan 2015
Apr 2015
Jul 2015
Oct 2015
Looking at the media coverage, you keep seeing the word ‘fracking’. So let’s add that.
Now that’s interesting. Compared with
‘hydraulic fracturing’, ‘fracking’ is so much higher that ‘hydraulic fracturing’
doesn’t even register.
That might be why the page is failing.
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Related searches
Topics
Top Rising
Queries
Top Rising
hydraulic fracturing - Film subject 100
fracking definition
Breakout
Shale gas - Industry
0
fracking earthquakes
Breakout
fracking natural gas
Breakout
fracking news
Breakout
gas fracking
Breakout
hydraulic fracking
Breakout
oil fracking
Breakout
Further down this page, you can see related terms people are searching for.
This can give you an idea of what people really want to know and help you narrow your content (if you want to).
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hydraulic fracturing
Web
News
Images
Videos
About 3,500,000 results (0.62 seconds) fracking
Web
News
Images
Videos
About 12,500,000 results (0.40 seconds) To be honest, you don’t even need to go that far sometimes. You can just do a quick search to see what people are writing about the most.
I wouldn’t just take this number in isolation and make big content decisions on it, but it is a good indication of the vocabulary other people are using.
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It’s pretty clear that more people use ‘fracking’
than ‘hydraulic fracturing’, but the page on your website doesn’t use the word ‘fracking’ at all.
No wonder no one reads it. No one can find it.
Your audience is using a different vocabulary.
This is just one way to find the words your audience is using. There are a number of tools, free and paid for, that can help you with this kind of research; and this type of research can be used for a number of different reasons that we’ll get to later in the book. Right now, we’re just going to assume you now know what kind of language your audience uses to find this topic. Now you can go out and find them. The more you know about your audience, the more successful you will be.
Using website
analytics and
metrics
Now you know some of the vocabulary your audience is using, you can find out more about them. This will give you:
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● more vocabulary (which can help them find your information)
● what your readers want to know most (so you can prioritise what you publish first)
● their mental models (this is how your audience thinks, which can help you with journeys around your site)
If you already have a website, you can use existing statistics and metrics. You might be able to see:
● how many people visit a page
● how quickly people leave
● most popular links on the page
● time people spend on a page
● search terms used on that page
● where they came from (referrals)
● where they go to
You might already have insight and research, so you might want to skip the rest of this chapter.
If you don’t have that kind of information, or you haven’t interpreted that sort of data before, try some of this.
Referrals
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of your audience comes from, so that you know where to position your marketing efforts.
You can find this out from the referrals section of Google Analytics or whatever software you use to track your site’s traffic. It’s also a good way to see where your users come from so you can see what kind of people they are, what they are reading, what language they used to get to your site, what link text they followed to get to you, and more. All of that adds up to more language you can use on the page to engage them.
Number of people visiting a page There will be 2 metrics here, confusingly called unique visits and visits:
● unique visits is the number of actual visitors to a page
● visits counts the amount of times that a page is displayed, no matter how many individual people visit. It includes the number of times the page has been reloaded or refreshed in the same browser For example, your analytics data could show 400 visits, but if they are all just you checking Case study
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out your own website, that’s one unique visit.
Again, you need to be careful with this sort of analysis. If a page only has 5 unique visits a month, you might decide it’s time to delete it; but first of all, find out why the page is failing. If you changed the language on the page, would it perform better?
Bounce rate
The term bounce rate means slightly different things to different people. It can mean someone landing on a page, not clicking on any of the links and leaving. Some count a bounce as someone arriving at a page and leaving in under 10 se
conds. When looking at your data, bounce rates can help you spot pages that aren’t working effectively. Be careful though – sometimes, a high bounce rate means a page is working well.
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A successful page meets a need Here’s an example from GOV.UK. When it comes to bank holidays in the UK, most people just want to know when the next one is. So it was put in large, highlighted text in the middle of the page. The other dates are there but not as prominent. People could read it in seconds, and leave. That could be termed a bounce and seen as a bad thing, but in this case the page is doing exactly the job it was meant to. If people spend less than 5 seconds on this page, that’s seen as an achievement, not a failure.
Time on a page
This refers to how long a particular reader spends on a particular page. It might be seconds, or minutes. Like the bounce rate, you’ll have to make an editorial judgement on whether time on a page is successful or not based on what the page is trying to do. If it’s a page with a lot of text that you want people to read, then higher time numbers are a good thing. On the other hand, if it’s a page with a single call to action that most people should skip through very quickly, high numbers are a warning sign that something on the page Case study
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doesn’t make sense to them.
Set your success criteria based on the page type or format and subjects you are writing about, not the site as a whole.
Searches on the page
We’ve talked about searches from a search engine but on-page and in-site searches can be a gold mine of information. If you have a page on hydraulic fracturing and your audience spend little time on that page, but there are lots of searches starting on that page for ‘fracking’, you can see what’s wrong.
If people arrived at your website by clicking a link from elsewhere, what text was linked on that other page? If they came via a search engine then bounced out again, what did they search for that they didn’t find on your page? How can you improve your content and their experience?