How to Make Your Content Findable?
By: Archana Chowty
Tags: User Experience Design, SEO, Content Marketing, Content Design, New York

Know the techniques to make your content findable when your customers need the most. Stay relevant and make an impact, here is how you can do this.

There is no doubt that content is the key in today’s digital world. Content helps you distinguish your brand from others. Getting the content right plays a huge role in the success of your business. But how do we know if customers are able to find what they are looking for? Is your content findable? Do you see customer’s leaving your website quickly? Is the engagement rate/time spent on your website is low? All this could be an indication that your content is not easily findable.

Findable content

Good content is characterized by its usefulness, scanability, and findability. Content is generally found using website navigation, search queries, and related links & pages.

Let’s look at some simple techniques that help you fix content findability.

Categorize and group information

Ensure your information is categorized and grouped in the way that customer’s use your information. Group the information depending on the nature of the content and its purpose. When information is grouped and labeled correctly, it enhances findability of content. Keep the relevant content together and provide recommendations to the related content to help customer’s find related content.

Organize content

When content is purpose driven it helps customer’s reach their goal faster and quicker. It is important to organize content, you can organize content by topics, functions, and services. Look for ways your customer’s use content and take cues from them to organize information meaningfully. Organize content based on user research, user context and user’s journey.

Optimize search

Search is the most efficient way of finding information. Most customers when they don’t find what they are looking for while browsing, they use search to find the information. Make sure your search is robust that means your information architecture is simple, content has all the relevant keywords with synonyms, content has words used by the customers. Images, videos, and audio are supported by Alt text. If your search is fetching correct information then a big part of findability is addressed. Indexing the pages, naming the URLs uniquely and adding meaningful metadata makes your search robust.

Add keywords

Know the terms used by users through web analytics and add those keywords, synonyms to make your content rich and findable. Using various variations of keywords makes your content findable.

Link related topics

It is important to understand the context in which the customer is in and providing related topics that help them move to the next step comfortably. Always provide related topics and pages together and recommend related/similar pages to help your customers navigate better, for example, you may like this, people who bought this also bought this, coming next, etc. these are examples of showing related topics that guide the users in the right direction. Linking related topics help you never miss a customer.

Improve scannability

We all know that people read differently on the computer, they first scan the information, if it is interesting and serving their purpose, they care to read end to end. Hence, it is important to pay attention to improve scannability of your content. Some of the content elements that you must enhance are:

Links (have meaningful names for all the links)

Headers (add headers and subheaders to show the section breaks, important information)

Lists (use both bulleted and numbered lists )

Images, tables, and graphics

Quotes

Highlighted text

White space

Good formatting plays a key role in enhancing the scannability of content. When your content is easily findable it helps in improving the overall user experience of the site. Scannable content aids to findability of content.

It is important to ensure your content is findable, manageable and reusable to make the most of your content. If you are beginning to improve your content for findability, keep your customers and their needs at the center. Start with small changes and notice how it impacts engagements and customer satisfaction.