Are you scouting for easy UX design tactics to improve your content strategy and website in general? As of January 2019, there were over 1.94 billion websites, and this means that the chances of a visitor coming back after a bad user experience are limited. A lot of things go into creating an unforgettable user experience for your site visitors, and the most critical aspect is that you need to have a content strategy. If your site cannot entice the visitor to stay, then your content will not be of any value.
A website’s UX design determines whether site visitors are willing to go beyond the landing page. This makes it important to have a content strategy that will work alongside the UX design to keep your visitors interested in your website.
With that said the big question is, “what does a good content strategy entail?” For starters, you need to do extensive research to determine who the audience is and what they want to consume. This makes it essential to create a great user experience that is backed up with valuable, useable, and engaging content.
While there are a million ways that you can use to develop content, there is no guarantee that it will appeal to every site visitor. However, certain tactics will help you improve your UX design while using the best content strategy.
In this article, we explore the actionable and easy UX tactics that will improve your content strategy. Read on to the end of the post, and take note of the things that you should be doing right, and supplement on the tactics that you are already getting right.
Actionable and Easy UX Design Tactics to Enhance Your Content Strategy
The Audience Comes First
In the business world, the customer is always right, and they are king or queen. In the same way, when you are looking to develop content for a website, you need to think about the audience and their content preferences.
This makes it important to have a profile of your ideal audience, which also includes details such as what they like, their ages, and other bits of information about their preferences. This process is important since what might seem like good content to you; might not be what your audience to your audience.
This not only applies to the content development process but also when it comes to UX design and other aspects of web design. UX design impacts content visibility and thus it affects its readability, and how the visitor understands it even when they only scan through it. This makes it important that you define a clear structure while using the appropriate labels and headers to improve UX.
Unbeknownst to most people, UX is at the centre of content strategy, and it is necessary that you understand the different user personas. These user persona profiles will help you in defining and optimising the tone, voice, messaging of your content for increased conversions.
As a bottom line, your audience should always come first, and this will improve your content strategy. This will set the precedence for creating clear and valuable content for your audience. However, you need to consider the people who are creating the content; they should do their due diligence to ensure that the content delivers value and that it is packaged in a clear manner.
Understand Your Brand Deliverance
Your UX will have a considerable impact on the reputation of your business or brand as well as the website. With continued improvements to your content strategy, you will achieve good UX, and it will define what your brand wishes to deliver.
The goal is to strike a balance between brand messaging and UX design which, in turn, will help you seamlessly deliver content on a variety of devices and channels. Your overall UX and content strategy ought to comply with brand guidelines.
According to Rebecca Lieb, every attempt at crafting a content strategy ought to go hand in hand with a measurement strategy. As simple as it may sound, you should have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve before you embark on the content-creating process irrespective of the medium.
Improve Your SEO
With updates to Google’s Penguin and Panda, a section of the online community believes that SEO is dead. However, this could not be any further from the truth. The updates have only made it much harder to rank on the first page, and with these content strategy tactics, you will have a fighting chance.
The updates in the algorithms are penalizing sites that use Black Hat SEO tactics. These tactics include clocking where you show information to Googlebot that is different from, what the real users get, ”hidden text”, which is white text on a white background, link spamming, among others.
While Black Hat SEO will work for a while, White Hat SEO coupled with inbound marketing is more rewarded by search engines today more than ever. In this light, you should strive to ensure that you include White Hat SEO while crafting your content strategy.
Black Hat SEO tactics will come at a grave cost to you and your brand. You should strive to remain on the search engine good side will pay off as long as you put in the effort to improve your inbound marketing tactics to boost your visibility.
Use White Space Creatively
This is a common element in UX design spheres as well as while crafting the content on your website. It gives the content an edge over your usual thought process. For example, you might have a lot of information on a subject, but it might not be something the audience wants to hear. Before you publish the content, you need to know how much of your content is consumed without making the reader feel overwhelmed.
When creating a content strategy, it is imperative that you have a specific flow or architecture for your information. To make the content more powerful, you need to complement it with elements of UX design. These two go hand in hand and it will increase the readability and consumption of the content on your site.
However, the audience will consume the content in a different manner. They will require mental bandwidth and time to process the curated information and this is where the white space comes in handy. The white space will allow you to deliver complex information in manageable chunks of text.
Use Visually Appealing Blogs with Valuable Content
To deliver impact to the audience, you need to complement your visually appealing website with blog posts whose content delivers value. Such blog posts are easy to consume and understand.
Most people stick to a static website that does not have updated information, and they wonder why they do not have the desired conversions. However, updating your content with visually appealing blog posts and content should be the goal of your content strategy.
For the blog posts content, your aim ought to be to ensure that it delivers value that then drives the user to make a decision. This means that the content ought to follow the following guidelines
- It ought to answer user questions, or at least guide them to the answer
- Leave the user feeling satisfied with the quality and authenticity of the information
- Does your content achieve the intended objective?
You should also use clear and concise language that does not burden the readers with jargon. If you use technical words, be sure to hyperlink it to an external website or a page on your website with a clear definition.
Pictures provide visual appeal; however, do not make the mistake of adding just about any picture you come across. Ensure that the pictures on the blog posts are of high resolution and relevant to the content.
Evaluate Your Sales Funnel
One of the common ways to improve your content strategy is to use a web analytics tool such as Google Analytics. It will give you data on when the people are dropping off from the sales cycle. You will afterward need to go back to your user persona profiles and determine why they are leaving without making a purchase or taking action.
With a bit of user research, you will identify the information gap, or did you not give the sense of trust and security with your content, or did you bring something up too late? By examining the sales funnel, you will find the problem areas that need reviewing and fixing to boost the conversion levels.
Having too many elements in your UX design or too much information, on the other hand, could lead to your website feeling cluttered, and this is one of the reasons for high dropout rates. Remember that clutter kills conversion.
Users will also want to know all the fees and expenses that they have to pay. Hiding them until the last minute only makes them leave the sales cycle without taking action.
Content Strategy Needs Teamwork
Content curation, UX design, and blending it is not an easy task, yet they play a huge role in boosting onsite user experience as well as conversions. Creating a content strategy alone will only get you so far, but with a team; you will achieve increased conversion and an easier brand reputation.
You will need the following disciplines to ensure the success of your content strategy
- Copywriting and information architecture
- Design and development
- SEO and marketing
- Brand reputation and PR
- Business stakeholders
The team is responsible for doing the research on the relevant information that goes into the content as well as strategically choosing the best course of action. The content team will need to bring in their editorial oversight and web writing skills. However, you will have to make a few changes before you get the right team.
However, there is the risk of having too many ideas, and the content strategy might not amount to anything. You need to cultivate a holistic view of the problem at hand, which is to improve your content strategy, and this ensures that all members of the team stick to the objectives.
Wrap Your Content in Metadata
In a web development context, metadata is a set of programming guidelines that help search engines and other applications to gain a better understanding of the content on a web page or blog post.
Yahoo and Google and other search engines have been giving preference to sites whose content has metadata. We can only expect that they will enhance this technology to encompass a wide variety of search items in the near future. With that said, there have been different metadata standards and you are best suited to stick with microdata as the metadata standard. The reason for this is that it is recognised and preferred by the top four search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex).
Metadata sounds like something that for the developers, but content strategists ought to care about it for the following reasons
- It helps your content to stand out from that of the competition on search engine results pages (SERPs)
- It will give your content more value and meaning when viewed on different devices and unexpected contexts
Since visibility is crucial for ranking on SERPs, you need to ensure that your developers understand the usefulness of metadata. It will also give a richer UX when a visitor is browsing your website.
Embrace Web Standards and HTML5
Web standards are a set of best practices that developers should use when building a website. The standards are written by a group made up of all the major browser manufacturers and search engines.
The reason to follow the web standards is to allow for consistency across the browsers, that it be indexed and crawled by search engines to improve rankings. Besides this, you will benefit from the features that are currently being compiled and added to the overall web standard.
HTML5, on the other hand, is a superset of the web standards and with a variety of elements. It also integrates scalable vector graphics, which are images that look good irrespective of the screen size.
Conclusion
UX brings together functionality, usability, and accessibility of the site with the content on the site. While it might not seem like they are correlated, they work together to bring about the harmony of the content strategy.
With the tactics above, you will be in a position to improve your content strategy and increase the value you extend to your site visitors. Your content strategy will, however, become pointless if you do not have a proper UX design.
No need to worry though, our team of website designers can do the hard work for you and carry out numerous tests to ensure that the new design is fully functional and delivering the expected results. Call us at +65 6789 9852 to book a free and no-obligation consultation session.
