By Janus Boye
During the past years, many digital projects have focused on trimming websites by making them leaner, cleaner and more effective in solving the key tasks of their customers.
Many websites suffer from so-called redundant, outdated and trivial (ROT) pages and it makes much sense to continuously address this problem from spiraling out of control.
Still if you want to take a customer-first approach, you need to add radically more pages to your site.
To understand why, let’s first take a step back.
Managing content chaos
You can easily get lost on most corporate websites and we probably all know the feeling of having to think really hard about how to find what we are looking for.
To be fair, if it is your job to create a digital presence in an organisation with multiple languages and multiple offerings, it is not exactly easy to design a website, so that it delivers a good customer experience.
Having less pages would in theory make it easier to navigate, find what you are looking for and also managing a complex website.
Many Boye members have indeed shared success stories at group meetings, where recent projects has dramatically reduced the amount of pages on their website. More than 80% reduction is not unusual, where some Boye members, has declared success by going from a chaotic web presence with say 10,000 pages to less than 2,000 pages.
Needless to say, 2,000 different pages with quality content still requires constant care and substantial resources.
To make a long story short, this is all what I would describe as the internal view. These are real problems, also with a genuine external impact, but let’s take a look at your website as seen from outside your organisation.
Get more website traffic and more leads
To understand why you probably don’t have enough pages, let’s start with a simple example from the customer perspective:
If I’m looking to buy a given product, say a good deal on a quality coffee machine for the office, I could use an almost infinite combination of search words to try to find what I’m looking for. Here’s some examples:
Highly rated coffee machine
Coffee machine latest model
Discount coffee machine
Coffee machines comparison
And then multiply this with different product lines and different languages. Chances are that you quickly come up short offering a high-quality page that leaves a good first impression and solves my task. Even if I go to your website, chances are that you don’t help me out.
Google and others offers tools which let you analyse search traffic and pick those terms with the most traffic. That’s the easy part.
The harder part is designing quality pages, which both makes it into the top organic search results for all those relevant search terms and truly helps me complete my task.
Either your pages get found on Google or someone else gets the order.
To be clear: To win you need radically more pages, ideally automatically created and maintained, which act as quality landing pages for those top keywords.
Steve Krug wrote the famous usability book “Don’t Make Me Think”, which covers mostly what I would today call website design common sense.
If you want to stop making your customers think and deliver outstanding customer experience, you have to abandon the internal mindset and truly put the customer first.
Creating many more relevant pages is crucial to success.
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Thanks to Boye community member Rasmus Jørgensen from Arla Foods for inspiring me to write this.