Building a website and leaving it untouched for years is no longer a viable strategy. Continuous content optimization ensures that your website evolves along with your target audience, as well as any changes in internal policy plans within your organization. But what exactly does this optimization involve? And how do you get started?
What is content optimization?
Content optimization means continuously improving your website to better align with your visitors' needs. This helps them find what they are looking for more easily, making the site user-friendly and accessible.
That last point—web accessibility—is especially important for government websites. Public institutions are required to ensure that their sites are accessible according to the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). These guidelines help make your website accessible to people with cognitive disabilities, visual or hearing impairments, and more. Making your site clear and accessible benefits everyone.
Content optimization is also crucial for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). By optimizing for search engines, you ensure that visitors can easily find your site and the information they need. Most visitors will find your website through a search query. When your site is optimized, your page will appear in search results, leading visitors directly to the relevant information.
What to optimize and how?
A relevant navigation structure
Content optimization starts with choosing the right pages for your website. At Paddle, we begin with a thorough preliminary phase, analyzing why visitors come to your site and what information they are most frequently seeking. Based on this analysis, heatmaps, and online surveys, we develop a clear navigation structure and identify top tasks. These top tasks often help the majority of your visitors find what they need in just one click.
Structured page types
By selecting a CMS with page types, the content is organized in a structured way, while remaining clear for visitors.
Content that answers questions
Another area for optimization is the content on your pages. Does your page provide a clear answer to your visitor's question? Are there enough links to other relevant pages, using a well-organized structure? You can further optimize this content based on input from your target audience.
Optimizing with keyword research
Keyword research can also help in optimizing your website. Through keyword research, we identify which words or phrases visitors use on Google to find your site. The next step is incorporating those keywords into your content. This way, you give a clear answer to the visitor's query, increasing the likelihood that search engines will rank your page higher when someone searches for that term.
Keyword research can also provide other valuable insights. For example, it can help you filter out industry jargon or include synonyms. Perhaps keyword analysis reveals that most people search for "passport" when they mean "travel document." By including both "passport" and "travel document" in your content and metadata, you ensure that people searching for "passport" still land on the correct page about travel documents. This benefits both your organization and the user seeking information.
Lastly, keyword research can inspire new pages, as you may discover missing information that people are searching for.
The value of content optimization
Continuous content optimization ensures you keep addressing both your visitors' needs and internal policy changes. SEO and accessibility also play a crucial role in optimization. An audit or analysis of your current site can help shape content optimization. At Paddle, we use heatmaps in the initial analysis. Online surveys and keyword research also provide insights into your visitors, forming the foundation for optimization. After launching the website, monitoring is key. Based on KPIs, we can evaluate whether the decisions made were correct and continue optimizing.
Would you like a clear plan and approach to optimize your site? Contact us for more information.