Semalt Shares Examples How To Personalize On-Site Content
Table Of Contents
- Introduction
- On-Site Content: What is It?
- Why Do You Need to Personalize Your Website Content
- How To Identify Good On-Site Content
- How To Personalize Your Website Content
- Some Examples Worth Mentioning
- Conclusion
Introduction
In the business world, there is always a reason to keep updated on the latest tricks and methods. Why? A business that doesn't, will be left behind. It would be like giving competitors the green card to take the lead. And now that almost everything is online, change is even faster. There are too many things going on and businesses are fighting to keep their customer's attention. One way to keep your customer glued to you and your services is through personalized on-site content.
So in this guide, information on how to maintain befitting website content and how to personalize it would be served to you on a silver platter. And if you reach the end, you would see some examples of big companies that use personalized content and how they did it.
On-Site Content: What is It?
Before diving into how to create award-winning personalized content that will grab your customer's attention, it would be best to begin at the top - What is on-site content?
Content is inevitable for a business website. It is crazy to have a website with no content on it (recall that content is more than texts alone). Therefore, we can conclude that CONTENT IS KING in website development. And there are two types; On-site content and Off-site content.
Off-site content is mostly associated with marketing and it is the part of a website's content that is created for link building. It is a technical part of SEO and website development but that is not the main focus.
On-site content, on the other hand, is an aggregate of the contents on the site - if that makes sense. This includes the help pages, the guides, the FAQs, and how-tos. Without on-site content, there is no reason for your customers or your website visitor to hang around. So for this guide, on-site content would be interchangeably referred to as website content.
Why Do You Need to Personalize Your Website Content
If the purpose of a thing is not known, there is plenty of room for its abuse. To effectively take advantage of the benefits of personalizing your website content, you need to know why you are doing it in the first place.
When your content is personalized, it is simply created for a specific person. This means that you would have content on your website, customized singularly for each of your customers. Now, this is not a huge task (you don't have to create millions of contents each for your customers). It just involves targeting a part of every content to each user. Ways to do this are to address visitors by their names, welcome them in their native language, or offer them deals based on their previous search history.
But again, why?
Here are some of the reasons personalizing contents are the in-thing:
- Your Customers Are Facing Information Overload: There are over a billion pieces of information online about a variety of things and people's attention span have reduced. Yes, many studies are backing this up including one by Adobe. With a shorter attention span and a huge box of information, people filter what they read and what they archive. To keep your content out of the archive zone, you have to make your content more personal to your customers
- They Help Organize Your Customers List: You don't have to raise a leg to arrange your customers into groups - they would do that themselves. Since the provided content is personalized to each of your customers, customers that have things in common would fall into the same categories. That way, all your website visitors are not everywhere.
- It is now Expected: Recall that there are millions of contents online and a lot of business owners are on their toes about the latest way to catch and keep their customers' attention. Yes, personalizing your content is a good way to keep your customers. But they have also become the in-thing such that it is now expected. If you don't have it, pass (that's how it is now).
- It gives your customers reason to take action: If you see an ad that calls out your name and asks you to check out a link, a deal, or a site based on your past searches, you would be more likely to click than one that has nothing to do with your history on the site. That's how it works. When you go personal with your customers, they stick around much longer.
Apart from the importance of personalizing your website content, there are benefits that both your customers and you get to gain. You'll give your customers a certain level of control, reduce their information overload, and give them a perception of choice. And the benefits that your business would stand to enjoy include more website visitors, a unique website, and better user engagement.
How To Identify Good On-Site Content
Yes, this article is about personalizing your website content. But just as it doesn't make sense to garnish rotten food, it is not reasonable to personalize bad content. Some pointers and factors would help to identify good on-site content from one that isn't worth the time and the resource. So if your website's content falls on the negative side, it would be sane to first fix that before attempting to personalize.
Luckily, there are many professionals in the field of content writing that can assist. So here are the things that help to identify good website content:
- The Focus: What is the content's focus? Many website contents online are more focused on SEO and rankings than the user. The best content is that which focuses on the question asked.
- How Is It Written? Ambiguous words are out of style. What's the use of content if the viewers cannot understand what is there? It should be well written, easy to understand, and RELEVANT. Yes, the content has to be relevant to the niche of your business.
- Duplication: This is another thing to pay attention to. Good content does not contain any duplicated pages. Not only is this not a good look on your website, but it can also be penalized.
- Keyword Optimization: This is another part of good on-site content. Add keywords to your content. This is both a good SEO strategy and a fine way to get more website visitors.
How To Personalize Your Website Content
Finally here! Below are the two steps to personalizing your great website (or on-site) content.
Step 1: Understand Your Audience.
You need three kinds of data to do this; Behavioral data, Demographic data, and Contextual data. Behavioral data involves all the things that your audience is interested in based on their past and recent clicks. Demographics involve their geographical location and this can be gotten from the IP address of the visitor. Finally, the contextual data refers to the situation of the audience when they visit the site such as if they are a new customer or preexisting.
Step 2: Create Different Variations on Your Website
This is the next step after getting to know your audience. There are different variations of personalizing your content and you can choose more than one depending on your result from step 1. 5 elements can be personalized and they are:
- The Headline: Use 'Let us help you create the website of your dreams', rather than 'Create a good website here'.
- Add a Call-to-action: Use 'Talk to a Consultant now', rather than 'Sign in or Login'.
- Add customers' testimonials, if any.
- Highlight your features or what you offer so that each visitor can navigate their way through what they are interested in.
- Recommend blog posts from either your site or a relevant secondary website. Remember to be personal about it. Use 'Check out these resources just for you', rather than 'Some blog posts'.
Some Examples Worth Mentioning
As promised, here are a few companies that use personalized on-site content and are thriving in it too.
- Spotify: Music is always suggested to users based on what they usually listen to. Does 'Based on the music you've been playing' sound familiar?
- Pandora: This is another company that uses personalized website content. They provide users with their radio stations.
- Amazon: They have personalized homepages with addressed names, a viewing history, and recommendations based on what users viewed last.
- Netflix: They also recommend movies based on the past films viewed.
- Semalt
- Nike By You
- Bid4Papers, etc.
Conclusion
The world has left the stage where websites look like they are being run by robots and heartless androids. Website owners are business people looking to communicate with visitors and sell to them. Therefore personalized on-site content is what is expected of every website owner. But before attempting to personalize, ensure that the content is on track. You can also analyze your website to know if you are on the right track before topping it with personalized on-site content.