Sticky Content
The term ‘Sticky Content’ refers to ensuring your visitors ‘stick’ when they land on your site pages, like a fly that fastens onto a sticky fly trap.
Not a nice image I know, but for long term success it is vital that your site’s content should make browsers stick and stay. Okay, maybe they won’t set up camp and live on your site, but you want to ensure they keep coming back. The way to do this is to always have fresh, topical, dynamic content. Content includes text, articles, data, member or user profiles, reviews, feeds, jobs, news, products, merchandise tables, visual and creative graphics, images and animations as well as audio and video files.
Today we will cover all aspects of content and this covers what to feature, what not to feature, where to get content, how to keep people coming back to you site again and again. Get them recommending the site to others. This is all crucial to building and maintaining your traffic.
SO YOU’RE A PUBLISHER NOW
Every time you post content on your website you are publishing it, so in effect you have become a Publisher. Your content is a valuable asset, which deserves the same care and attention that a magazine publisher or newspaper editor will place on their content.
Your Content Strategy should focus on your goals and objectives for your site as well as fulfilling your target audience or niche visitor’s needs.
Your web content must resonate with your visitors and do more than just sell your products or services. It must also contribute to your brand’s positive image. Your carefully selected content aims to label your online business as a trusted industry source, so it should reflect your brand values and position you as a thought leader and sector expert. As you learn more about your audience and your site grows, so will your confidence as a publisher.
Visibility = Credibility
We chatted briefly about an ‘About Us’ and ‘Contact Us’ page when we designed your Navigation Map.
One small area of content is your ‘About Us’ page where you get the chance to tell people about you and your products and more importantly, why they have to have them. You know that old ‘to die for’ expression? Use it here.
Don’t wax lyrical and go overboard, just write out a fabulous summary with your unique proposal. Another important point to take on board is to let your personality shine. Don’t be shy and hide who you are. You will build trust and creditability by showing yourself, your staff and founders.
We didn’t include this when we first launched Remote Employment, thinking no one would care. Well, they did. We got so many emails asking more about us and then, when we added our contact number, the phone rang off the hook because people were interested to know more about us and talk to us.
When we added pages on ourselves as Founders and then followed that up with a ‘team’ page, our visitors were delighted to meet us ‘virtually’ and we are constantly swamped with people telling us how wonderful it is to see the people behind the site. We are proud to show off our company’s personality. You should be too. Being open and visible gains your visitors’ trust and builds integrity.
Another option is to include a Google Map flagging where you are in the world so people know you really do exist. This is especially important if you have an office, warehouse or store where they can purchase goods.
Don’t Hide Behind Logins
When we first started Remote Employment we thought we were clever to hide our jobs behind a login area so we could build up a member base.
This was a great idea for a while, as we did certainly build the database because visitors wanted to see what kind of remote and home working jobs we had on our site. When they logged in they found a smorgasbord of tasty home working, remote working and home business treats.
But can you see the stumbling block? By not showing our job content openly, we were, in effect, telling the search engines not to search and index those most important areas.
We realised all too quickly the mistake we had made and it took many more months before we could rectify this. We moved to an ‘open plan’ solution to give everyone access to all our jobs and therefore resolve the sticky content issue - and give Google access to crawl all over our job content. Our solution was to ensure the job postings were public and then encourage people to register to apply for the jobs.
Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate is affected by your content. You will see in your Google Analytics account (coming up) that you have a statistic called Bounce Rate. This is also termed as the Exit Rate (not to be confused by Exit Route as discussed earlier).
A Bounce Rate reflects the percentage of visitors who ‘bounce away’ to a different site, rather than continue on to your other pages. This happens when a new visitor only views a single page on your website and leaves without viewing any of your other pages. In effect they land, take a quick glance around and think, ‘Mmm, not for me’ and off they go again, like a flea bouncing around in a dog parlour.
GOOGLE’S DEFINITION: a bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.
They use this metric to measure visit quality. A high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. This should remind you of our discussion a few days ago about your home page being crucial to spell out your key message.
Keep ‘Em Coming Back
The more compelling your key landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site, have a look around and convert to sales.
You can reduce your bounce rate by adapting landing pages to each keyword, link or advert that you run. Landing pages should provide the information, product or services mentioned in the original place where the visitor first spotted your link.
If you have different aspects to your site, ensure that the landing page links you give out are relevant to the page content. Another instance of being tacky and sticky is to ensure you have enough content.
FOR EXAMPLE: when we first started out we had only a few jobs. It was like having a nice shiny new restaurant and nobody eating in it.
So we had to source loads of good remote and home working jobs as our content, to ensure we retained the stickiness on site to keep people viewing all our pages.
Jobs are only one part of our content, in fact we didn’t consider our jobs to be content at first, but quickly realised that they formed an integral part of our site content, along with resources and articles.
Loyalty Campaigns
Ask yourself why you go back to sites that you like. It is usually because it solves a problem or fulfils a need, it entertains you or it’s offering the advice and support you need at a particular time in your life.
Think about providing your audience with enticing offers, discounts, useful content and information of new products and new innovations.
Set Up Dialogue
Communicate your key message by setting up a dialogue with your customers, clients and visitors. Think about having a little area that shares what’s new and what’s in store for anyone who visits the site for the first time. Hook them in and don’t let go. Keep up the conversation with regular updates, but don’t fall into the trap of having out of date info or, worse still, a statement with an actual date that is so old that it instantly ages your site!
How many times have you landed on a site and found that it was last updated years ago? Your immediate thoughts are: Is this site still relevant? Is anyone home? Are they out for lunch or has the business folded? You probably bounced away before finding out.
Don’t build up this wonderful new baby of yours, get it to the toddler stage and then abandon it. All your hard work should pay off when you keep it invigorated by updating information and adding relevant content as your website matures.
Summary
Even though we started the day with visions of flies stuck on gooey fly traps, you now know how to ensure your new site wows your visitors with relevant and sticky content and keeps them interested and engaged.
We discovered that good quality content is the lifeblood of your online business as regularly updated content keeps your site fresh and alive. At the same time it keeps the search engines coming back to crawl your site and it becomes a traffic builder.
Checklist
- Are you going to have a member login area?
- Remember to check out your bounce rate in Google when your site goes live
- What content will you use?
- Find articles and content to include
- Find sources of good information
- Consider forums and chat rooms
Watch out for the next in this series. In the meantime, enjoy adding content to your site!
Award-winning entrepreneur, speaker and bestselling author of ‘Create A Successful Website’, Paula Wynne offers practical workshops to help you succeed online. Find out more about Paula at www.paulawynne.com
Pettersen is the self styled Chief Technology Officer here at Moonfruit. Asked to explain his role to me he describes it as three targets he likes to ‘hit.’ He oversees new product development, keeps the servers running and generally chips in with the strategic direction the company is heading in. In an attempt to find a common ground between us I suggest it’s similar to the three parts of a workout; Warm-up, muscle work and cool-down? But Pettersen quickly corrects me that there’s no time for a cool-down – He’s always pumping iron.
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