Design for Online Engagement

SEO, Content and Design Optimization for Editors and Designers

David Holston

• Publisher: HOW Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781440334481
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Design General

The world changes on a daily basis. People's needs change, political, technical and social thinking changes, and your site will need to change to reflect the world around it. On a daily basis you need to be aware of any number of elements including strategy, brand, search, content, design, code, and measurement. And you need to be constantly checking to make sure you're on course. The Web never sleeps, and neither should your site.

PART I:

A Model of the Online Communication Universe

If you work in the world of online communication, you probably spend a lot of time thinking about how people communicate on the web. You probably think about the business needs of your clients. You think about the needs of their audiences. You think about design and brand issues and how they might influence the visual and verbal content on a site. You think about the code behind the pages. You think about how to get visitors to engage on the site and how the client might be able to start a relationship with visitors. It’s a lot to consider, and I’m always looking to break it down into a more understandable form so I can wrap my brain around it. So I came up with a simple mental model. I call it the sushi model.

Starting from the outside…

• Brand: What do you stand for? Everything an organization does is wrapped in its brand. Every action and every message is a reflection of the ethos of the organization. At its core a brand is about positioning yourself among your peers. It’s the unique value you provide your audience, and it’s the unique way you deliver your offering. It is also the most valuable asset your organization owns, contributing a considerable amount to stockholder value.
• Design: How do you express your brand strategy? One of the first experiences people have with an organization is through its brand communications. Because of their visual nature, the design elements of a brand have a tremendous impact on how the brand is perceived by an audience. In many cases, the design of the product, its packaging and advertising are the trigger and motivator for an audience to engage with the brand. Visual identity is made of several important graphic components that are designed to work together to represent the brand.
• Audience Need: Whom are you trying to reach? Knowing the needs of your audience, their personalities and the context of your offering in their lives is critical information that will inform everything from the language you use to the design direction. Your goals should tie directly to an audience need. And like any good communication endeavor, what you’re talking about should be relevant to the group of people you want to connect with.
• Organizational Goals: What are you trying to achieve? The reason your site exists is to communicate an idea to a specific audience. You could be trying to promote an idea, sell a widget or tell a story. It could be anything. By conducting business analysis you can identify organizational goals to tie your communication efforts to, and bring focus to your sites goals. Focus is as much about knowing what you’re NOT going to do as it is about knowing what you ARE going to do. As a rule of thumb, your online content should be tied directly to your organizational goals.
• Usability: How can you make it easy for your visitors? Now that your target audience has found your site, they need to be able to easily find what they are looking for. This is where usability comes into play. Clear navigation, calls to action and well thought-out design help make the site experience more positive for visitors, allowing them to achieve their goals quickly.
• Accessibility: How can you be inclusive? Over 20 percent of people on the web have some sort of visual, hearing, physical, speech or behavioral disability. This makes accessibility a key factor in ensuring a wide range of users can access your site. Accessibility standards like Section 508 or the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have a carryover effect by making sites more usable and more search engine friendly.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): How will people find your site? To find your content, people will conduct a search query. The more closely the search words they use match the keywords on your site, the more likely they are to make an online connection with your brand. Keywords are just one element that improve site optimization. Other key elements include attracting links from highly regarded outside sites, the number of social media likes and shares for your content.
• Content strategy: What do visitors want to know? Content is the reason people visit your site. High quality relevant content sets the foundation for establishing a relationship with your site visitors. If your content is really good and other sites want to link to you, you start to create site authority, which makes your site even more prominent in searches. Along with the quality of the content, you also need to know how to promote your content. You increase your chances of creating awareness for your brand through the use of search and landing page optimization, as well as identifying influential bloggers, social media and news channels to promote your content.
• Engagement, relationship building and loyalty: How can the brand create a mutually beneficial relationship? At the core of communication is the goal of creating a mutually beneficial relationship between a brand and an audience. Almost everything you do on your site is about achieving this goal. Relationships are generally demonstrated through engagements, or interactions in which both parties provide a value to each other. But strong relationships don’t happen overnight. In fact, researchers have found that relationships are developed through many small interactions over time. In the online world, a relationship can culminate in many ways including making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, downloading a white paper or even making a comment on a post. But engagement is not the endgame of your online communication presence. Loyalty is ultimately what you are hoping to achieve.

Online Communication Model

So there you have it. The sushi model of online communication.

But you didn’t buy this book to talk about sushi. You’re interested in the forbidden knowledge of SEO, design, content and conversion. So without further ado…

THE WAY WE COMMUNICATE TODAY

Why do we care about this stuff? The simple answer is that people and brands need to communicate. Communication is a key strategic function and impacts everything (both internally and externally) related to the organization, including the key points along the buying cycle such as awareness, creating interest, desire and engagement. Part of the reason firms dedicate large percentages of their budgets to advertising, marketing and public relations is because business is competitive, and communication is one of the big guns in the battle for creating brand awareness and market share. Competition online is no exception. At the time of this writing, June 2013, there are 4.1 billion indexed pages on the web, or about 700 million websites. For communicators, this means that the chances of a searcher finding your brands content is getting increasingly more challenging. This is why SEO is so important.

Another big factor that contributes to communication competition is that the means of communication has been democratized. Today, brands can control their own communication channels and don’t always need advertising agencies or the news media to the extent that they used to.

In the old model, brands would buy expensive television, radio or newspaper advertising to get their message out. These channels relied on a shotgun approach – sending out untargeted messages to the broadest audience possible. They also used an interruption model that relied on coercion to get people to act. The approach focused on a one-way conversation, speaking to audiences about topics the brands were interested in pushing out. Not only was it difficult to calculate a return on investment on this type of approach, it was also incredibly expensive.

Today the online advertising market is on the rise, second only to television, making up over 23 percent of all U.S. advertising, Online’s ability to deliver highly relevant customized advertising to target audiences makes it a more strategic tool for communicating with key audiences. Online channels currently have the second largest audience share behind television. Radio and print are falling far behind both television and online channels. This makes online one of the primary influencers of public decision-making and opinions.

The news media is suffering a similar decline. Brands are now acting like publishers and can now communicate directly with their audiences through websites, blogs, videos, Twitter and Facebook. Although newspapers and television are still important channels for disseminating news content, these avenues are slowly losing share to online channels. With newsrooms shrinking and TV and print news outlets opting for the lowest cost and least informative reporting approaches, people are looking elsewhere for their news. According to a recent Pew Research poll nearly 31percent of people have stopped using their preferred news outlet because of the decrease in quality. Many of these people are opting for news content found online where they can get indepth analysis and multiple viewpoints.

The web offers brands the opportunity to connect directly with their specific audiences not only to communicate messages, but also engage in a conversation. And all this can be done at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising and print communication while allowing the brand total control of the frequency and content of its message.

So how do you set your brand apart from all the online chatter? The short answer is through the creation of high-quality, relevant content. Like a Death Star tractor beam, your high-quality content will pull in digital influencers (people who have topic-specific blogs or websites that relate to your offerings), peers, searchers and an array of others who will then embed, share and write about your content. In this regard, your content serves three purposes; first, to position your brand as an authority; second, to act as a form of advertising; and third to act as a form of lead generation.

The longer answer is, as you might have guessed, much more complicated. First you need to make sure these audiences can find your content, so you need to understand the fundamentals of SEO. You need to make sure that once they find the content it is presented in a way that appeals to their reading style, and answers their questions, so you must also understand the nuances of user-centered design if you expect your visitors to enjoy their time on your site. Most important, you need to have a measurable goal for your site so you know if it’s helping you achieve your objectives.

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ONLINE COMMUNICATION CHECKLIST

• Brand: What do you stand for?
• Design: How do you express your brand strategy?
• Audience Need: Whom are you trying to reach?
• Business Goals: What are you trying to achieve?
• Usability: How can you make it easy for your visitors?
• Accessibility: How can you be inclusive?
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): How will people find your site?
• Content strategy: What do visitors want to know?
• Engagement, relationship building and loyalty: How can the brand create a mutually beneficial relationship?

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PART II: SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

How to attract qualified visitors to your site

Somewhere in Kansas, someone has a sudden urge to buy new shoes. What does she do? Well if she’s like most of the world, she heads to Google or Bing. But she’s not just looking for shoes; she’s looking for very special shoes. These shoes need to be a certain color, style, size, brand and a special price. And how does she start her search? By typing (or in some cases just saying) what she’s looking for, in some combination of descriptive words, into the search engine, of course. For example, she might type ruby red slippers. This is where the land of SEO begins.

If you’re an online shoe store, or any organization that wants to engage with people online, the goal of SEO is to have your offering appear at the top of the list when people search for terms related to your brand or offering. Ultimately, SEO is about making your site more visible to search engines so you can drive more qualified traffic to your site.

There are any number of search engines that people can use, but the really important ones that you need to concentrate on are Google and Bing. These two search engines feed most of the other search engines. Bing provides search results for Yahoo, AOL and Earthlink. Comcast gets their search results from Google.

If there is any doubt about the...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Part 1: A Model of the Online Communication Universe
• Part 2: How to attract qualified visitors to your site
• Part 3: Designing pages that inspire visitors to take action
• Part 4: How to create relevant content that meets the needs of your visitors and your organization
• Part 5: How to make sure you are achieving your online goals
• Part 6: Where do you go from here?
• Copyright