Successfully crossing the finish line for a website redesign is a great feeling. Your brand’s online presence is up-to-date, and your imagery and messaging are well poised to carry you into the future. As your brand’s 24/7 marketing hub, it is important that your website remains up-to-date and that you are feeding it new content on a consistent basis – be it in the form of news, blog posts, case studies or the like. Here are a few ways to add quality content (not clutter) to your website:
Explainer videos
Explainer videos are great ways to help simplify complex products and processes. With a short piece of dynamic content you can help people to understand the challenge, the solution and how to get from Point A to Point B. Below is a sample of an explainer video Co-Communications developed for AdminaHealth to help businesses understand how technology could streamline the management of their self-funded benefits plan.
Beyond providing educational and dynamic content that is easier for visitors to consume, adding video to your website also has search value. Forrester reports having a video on your homepage increases your chances of appearing on the first page of organic search results on Google by 53 times, compared to a plain text homepage. Video also accounts for 74 percent of all online traffic this year (2017).
FAQ pages
As previously discussed on our blog, FAQ pages are a great way to appear in relevant organic search results. When you add an FAQ page to your website, you demonstrate a keen understanding of your target audiences and buyer personas, and showcase your firm’s expertise. Remember, the majority of visitors will be accessing your website from their smartphone so the list of questions doesn’t need to be exhaustive. Focus on the most common questions your team fields and those which will help to better qualify the prospects and leads who move beyond the website to take action such as emailing/calling your firm or downloading a piece of premium content.
Photo galleries
With the human attention span ranking shorter than that of a goldfish, companies have a finite period of time to capture the attention of website visitors. In addition to videos, high quality photography is a great way to achieve that objective.
As Instagram’s popularity continues to rise – the platform currently boasts more than 700 million users – installing a feed on your website can help to make the user experience more dynamic and engaging. One organization embracing this opportunity is the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA), which has a feed of attendee-generated images using the #massmoca hashtag on the homepage of their website.
Opportunities to take action
In a world of information overload, it is critical to tell people what you want them to do with the content that they are consuming. Do you want them to like or ‘react’ to the images you post on Facebook? After reading your e-newsletter, should they forward it to a friend? And, to the topic at hand, what do you want people to do after they visit your website?
While calls-to-action vary based on the stage of the sales funnel your website visitors are currently in (it isn’t likely someone who has just started reading online reviews and visiting company websites in pursuit of a new vacuum will purchase the first one they see, let alone switch accounting or IT firms after a few minutes of casual online browsing), it is important to have calls-to-action for at least the top and bottom of the funnel on your website. Unsure which calls-to-action will work best? Test the same call-to-action in a few locations on your website and then begin testing both the ask and the location to determine which pages of your website drive the most action and which calls-to-action are most compelling to visitors.
While it can be tempting to sit back and admire your new website once it has gone live, it is important to remember that you want the website to remain up-to-date and be an accurate reflection of your organization at all times. As you build upon the strong foundation you have set with your new responsive website, focus on adding high value content that is relevant to your target audiences and avoid adding clutter that complicates or detracts from the user experience.
