A key indicator of the success of a website is the number of readers it has. Irrespective of the organisation or the type of content, if few people visit the website, it will not be regarded as a winner.
So how can you build website readership?
One of the best strategies is through targeted new content. Compared with other growth strategies (like advertising or cross-promotion with other media), using content to attract readers has major advantages. These include the fact that it is usually cheaper, it allows you to simultaneously promote your organisation’s agenda, and it is self-perpetuating – good content will result in long-term readership growth.
So how do you go about selecting the new content – and ensuring it will work?
The first step is to know your existing readers – to be aware of the characteristics of those currently reading the site.
This is the case for two reasons.
The first reason is that you do not want your new content to disenfranchise existing readers. (The last thing you want to do is lose existing readers at the same rate as you gain new readers – if you do that, you won’t see any growth!)
Techniques that can be used to find out about your existing readers include:
- analysing the search terms readers are currently plugging into your site search facility – this immediately shows what your existing readers are expecting to find on your site
- looking at referrers’ lists (either generated internally or by the use of free Google Analytics) – this shows the links that readers have followed to get to your site, and so you can see what their other interests are
- formally logging telephone and email feedback about the site
- ascertaining what proportion of your readers are regulars and what proportion are those that come only once and never return – the ‘oncers’ (Google Analytics can show this data)
From this and other information you can develop a detailed picture of your existing readership. You’ll be able to pick different audiences that currently use your site (for example, an audience might be school students, or it might be the elderly, or it might be academics) and also get a good ‘feel’ for why they come to your site.
And the other reason that you want to find out the characteristics of your existing readers is that once you know who your existing readers are, you can think about the audiences you’d have expected the website to have – but don’t have!
This approach of identifying missing audience groups is critical if you are to successfully develop new content that targets those groups.
Confused? OK, here’s an example.
Imagine you run a Government website devoted to publishing the latest in health and medical statistics. One of the areas on which your organisation extensively publishes is breast cancer. Because your organisation has the latest statistics on breast cancer, you’d expect part of your audience to consist of support groups for breast cancer and specialists in breast cancer research. But when you look carefully at the characteristics of your existing audience (eg how many people use the term ‘breast cancer’ in internal site searches, how many referrers to your site are links found on breast cancer sites, and so on) you discover that in fact very few of these audiences actually read your material.
To build that specific audience group, you might decide to do any one of a bunch of things. You might re-jig the content so that reports on breast cancer are presented at a number of different levels of complexity. (So there’s readily accessible and ‘easy’ material available, as well as the more complex stuff.) Or you might decide to improve site navigation to the breast cancer content. Or you might decide that some interviews with your organisation’s breast cancer researchers would make some good newsworthy content for the home page.
So you see, once you have identified some of the audiences that you’d have expected to be reading your site – but are not – you can develop content that better targets those groups.
The next step is to pitch that content so that existing readers also enjoy it – but that’s a topic for another time.
A one-day course by Julian in Strategic Use of Content to Build Website Readership is available through Acorn Training and Consulting.
Filed under: Articles on preparing web content
