Package Your Content Vertically and Horizontally

Most companies—small and big alike—put their Web site content into silos with products in one silo, services in another silo, white papers in still another silo and so on. It may make sense to do it that way, but it doesn’t go far enough to play into the way site visitors search for info. It’s too much to expect most people to hop, skip and jump from one silo to the next to mentally assemble the information they’re looking for.

Think about also creating content packages around a key product, service or concept that lives on one page. So, for example, you might create a page for your front-end services or a client’s famous Framastat, which would include short, but descriptive information about about the service or product followed by linked entry points to a fuller product description, spec sheet, instruction manual, white paper, Webinar, podcast. In other words, access to everything that’s relevant about the service and product from one page.

The added advantage is your page’s content can be arranged in a visible hierarchy, which aids both finding and related information about whatever you’re offering. Your reader now has the option of finding information vertically (in silos) or horizontally (in packages).Magazine and newspaper editors do this sort of thing routinely with lengthy articles. No one reasonably expects someone to turn to page 10 to read the main article, page 20 to view a related photograph or chart, and page 30 to read a related sidebar. Chunks of related content live as close to each other as possible thus making it accessible with as few page jumps (or clicks) as possible.

The trick is to keep site visitors from bouncing out of the site after viewing a page or two just because it’s just too much work to hunt down the info they’re looking for.

It’s also easy to package, say, a data sheet, white paper and product manual into a single package and make them downloadable with a single click. You might not want to include lengthy multimedia in your content container because of the download times but it’s a snap with PDFs, for example.

I used that device for a market research company that wanted to package three related briefs on some of the technology work they’ve done. The company called it the “Lunch Box Series.” To download the package, site visitors had to enter contact information that the company then used to follow up with in hopes of boosting sales. It was highly effective.

Give it a try: Check your bounce rate using Google Analytics to see which pages attract visitors and how long they stay on your site and a host of other information that will help you pacakge your content and that of your clients. Create a package of information and see how it works for you and your clients.