Make your Blog Pop: Using User Experience Design to Attract Readers
In today’s globally accessible blogging community, readers are inundated with content marketing from all angles; blogs occupy one part of that content. Many of them are deeply personal, expressing what the writer did that day or venting about work. To attract readers, you have to give the readers something worthwhile. That means thinking with a user-design strategy.
UX Design
In 2014 Google updated its algorithm to weed out sites using spam to increase their page rankings, banning many of the worst offenders from being indexed. They did this as a means to raise the quality of material available to searchers. Raising the quality of what is posted online is just one way that mega-companies are using user-experience design to encourage marketing professionals to think of the user when posting. If you really want your blog to attract a wide audience, then you should also be aware of what your users–your readers–might want the most.
Founder and President of Semantic Studios Peter Morville created a user experience honeycomb, a diagram of traits your content must have to fully realize the benefits of your online presence.If you incorporate each of those into your blog, you will ensure that your message gets the attention it deserves. See how you can implement each of the seven traits into your blog:
Desirable: Is what you’re writing about interesting to people in general? Not too many people want to read a blog that leaves them feeling unpleasant. If you can keep your topic on the brighter side and refrain from using it as an outlet for a vent, people will want to read.
Accessible: Everyone should be able to access your blog, whether they are on a desktop computer, tablet, or mobile phone. This means using responsive design on your page that is easily viewable in different configurations.
Usable/Useful: I have combined two of the traits into one important component. A good blog is equally both. Readers should be able to use information they get from your blog in their everyday life. This doesn’t mean you have to do a self-help blog or that the usefulness has to be tangible. Providing information that they can use down the road is just as valid.
Valuable: Readers should get something out of your blog. Whether this is information on a subject or a new technique for coloring their hair, or they simply got a good feeling from reading, readers need to feel that they didn’t waste their time.
Findable: This is where SEO comes into play, and is the reason keywords are so important. If you do some simple research before you start writing to see what the main keywords are within the topic you are blogging about, you can then cater your writing to include those keywords and gather a higher ranking on Google, which is ultimately how your blog will be found above the thousands of others posted on a daily basis.
Credible: This is often overlooked when writing a blog. Many people think that since a blog is a more intimate piece of writing, the reader comes into it with a certain amount of trust in you up front. But this should make it more important for you to use credible information to back up your blog. If you are talking about your daughter’s elementary school play and offhandly mention that PIlgrims settled in Virginia, for example, you’re going to lose some credibility when readers find out you provided faulty information and didn’t bother to double-check it.
