What you should really worry about when you think of your website?

I have been talking to quite a few website owners who happen to be world renowned consultants, medical practitioners with decade long established practices and a couple of technology business owners. When I talk to them about their websites, they are either too possessive about the content or go on backfoot to say that they are already considering revamping their websites. But during all these interactions with them there are quite a few things I noticed about their websites and as an analyst I could already see a pattern emerging which is more likely to be a common pattern for many website owners. Although the techniques I used and code I wrote to analyze their webpages is not in the purview of this article, what we are going to discuss are some of the questions we should ask ourselves when we think of making the website better.   

Is my target audience viewing my website? Am I measuring the usage somehow?

Many of us think that a web page once written is done for life. That’s not really the case. We should consider our webpages as ‘living’ pages and we should keep tracking the usage of atleast a few key pages through tools such as Google Analytics. Remember that line – you cannot improve what you cannot measure. Apart from Google Analytics you can also measure engagement levels for your LinkedIn Posts, Instagram Posts and Tweets.

Am I able to visualize the traffic coming from all the platforms at one place?

Make sure you have attached your website to a traffic monitoring tool such as Google Analytics, atleast 1 to 2 weeks before you start promoting your content. Whenever you promote content on social media platform such as Facebook, LinkedIn etc make sure to add the link to your website to all your posts. This helps you shorten your posts and fetch traffic to relevant website content.

Is my website ‘SEO’ed or search engine optimized?

It is a truth that keywords, hashtags, metatags bring the traffic to your website. It implies that if you use the appropriate words in webpages and add them in website metatags and hashtags, then only the job of posting is complete. The relevance of keywords for your business and their uniqueness decide how much relevant traffic is likely to arrive at your website. All webpages should have unique metatags. What we do most of the times is that we consider the activity of finding keywords as an afterthought and use common keywords across all the webpages.  We should always keep revisiting the keywords and calibrating them based on the engagement we are driving. Another thing that is usually overlooked is adding keywords to images (alt text) as that helps google understand what your images are all about.

Are my webpages following basic writing styles?

‘Structuredness’ of a document is a major factor that keeps audience engaged. This is true for webpages too. If you are starting a page with heading1, make sure you follow them up with heading2,3 etc. Whenever the users glance at webpages, they look for the structure of content and feel a sense of direction. If you are having too much of long winding/unending paragrphs, you are surely to make your audience gasp for air to breath. Audiences feel more at ease with structure content. Even if you are not following the styles correctly audience considers to be your callousness. What I have observed is that people start with Heading 1 and Heading 2 styling and lose the focus midway. Many a times tags such as <bold> and <strong> are used as an alternative to Heading 3 and Heading 4 styles. They may look similar in HTML editors, but different in html output. Always make sure to doublecheck your output before going live.

How long should my page scroll?

There are no logical limits to page length. But longer pages with too many scrolls may get boring if you are not putting right content and sprucing up with good graphics. For long winding pages, you must put a lot of thoughts in writing styles, suggestive graphics and relevant videos. If you don’t have these readily available, consider short and concise writing. Audiences don’t mind short and crisp pages if they have relevant information. But they easily get turned off because of boredom and monotony. So in any case limit the scrolls to 5 or 6. Provide more toggle menus where people can have choise to read more or move on. Make sure to provide links to other webpages to keep audience engaged. The page scroll limit will also imply that you shorten the image size or thumb nails so that readers don’t get distracted.

How do I find suitable keywords for websites and promotional content?

No amount of underlining the importance of keywords would be enough to imbibe the importance of keywords. But you should not get worked up and start panicking about it. Simpy put, find the most unique keywords from your written content. It may be a text, power point, wordfile, proposal or existing content. Make sure to spend enough time in discussing these keywords before finalizing and make clusters based on your competencies, domains, technologies and business verticals. Build a good keywords bank and keep it handy. The point to consider is that you must add keywords that are also in webpage content. Modern text analytics techniques can help you find unique words that are appearing in your content though machine learning algorithms.

Is my content tone suitable for desired audience?

It is now an established fact that young audiences have lesser patience and not in a mood to dig deeper at the first reading. Your content needs to be simple, addressing them directly and talking actionable things or providing more opportunities of interaction. Content with long paragraphs, third person tone and passive voice still may attract audiences aged above 35 years. Such content is not bad at all from language perspective. But to address younger audience, you must adapt conversational tone, simple word usage, more actions than theory/concepts and an active voice.

What is the the best approach to start creating web content?

There is no such fix formula for content development activity planning. But if you really want to start seeing deliverables early in the process, start with small focussed power point presentations and detailed case studies. As the structured case studies get going you start understanding the nature of content suitable for your offerings. You also start building a good knowledge base that talks about your technical competencies, domains served, verticals addressed. The case studies also help you articulate typical business problems per vertical and they are your potential keywords, hashtags and metatags. As you go on building at least 5 case studies per competency, per vertical, per domain you eventually accumulate good knowledge base. Once you acquire such content it helps you in all your long-form content activities such as corporate brochures, websites, sales pitches and videos.

What is the most important aspect of website?

The answer to this question is quite simple, can people see your website quickly on their devices? This simple answer has many underlying factors. It means that the content management system is competent to handle your website pages, uploaded images, scripts and videos. If they are not loaded quickly, there is no use of all the creative images, videos and written content. Website should load quickly on any device, any location and any network. Period. If it takes longer to load, you have lost your audience without even reading a single webpage. As I said earlier, people don’t have patience to wait until your webpage gets loaded. They are here to glance quickly and not read as the earlier generations would do. Audience have changed their habbit because of the information flooding.

Conclusion

Thanks for your patience and reading this far. It means that writing blogs like this one is also another way of keeping the engagement level. To conclude, I would say that you don’t have to go for website revamps everytime you feel like improving your website. It is like reconstructing the house every time you want to make it better. The points we discussed above can help you tune up your website and make the content work for you.

Agree? I will be glad to know your comments and feedback!!!