The new year is the perfect time to revisit your organic content recommendation strategy. Organic recommendations harness the power of the content you already produce to keep users on your site longer. One article or video leads to another which increases engagement and pages per session.
Here are three easy ways to increase organic recommendations:
1. Don’t leave users stranded
Are you presenting visitors with enough options to find content? Gone are the days of users perusing index pages and top sections on a desktop. Now, most people land directly on an article, video or slideshow several layers deep—usually from a smartphone or other mobile device. It’s important to visit your site through a variety of referral points—such as social media, email or mobile links—to find where users may be hitting dead ends.
Tip: Regularly look at your site through the eyes of your users and ensure users aren't being stranded on an article or video page.
2. "More from this section"
A simple way to get started is by adding a "More from this section" block. For example, when users visit a local news page, offer them easy access to more local news headlines and stories. Or, present more content from the sports section such as highlights, scores or athlete profiles. These blocks are most commonly placed at the bottom of the article and this strategy has resulted in the highest pages per session for TownNews partners.
Tip: Place a "More from this section" block at the bottom of an article to offer related recommendations.
3. Show content based on your user's actions
Take organic recommendations a step further by offering links to content users might also like. Provide more content based on context and keywords, or based on the user's past behavior. This behavior, often referred to as audience browsing data, could include answering a poll question, clicking a keyword, saving an article or browsing a specific section.
Using audience browsing data, such as the data in the TownNews iQ Engage program, reduces bounce rates and increases engagement. Users consume twice as much content per session when given contextual recommendations and three times as much for recommendations based on their own behavior.
Tip: Provide additional content based on audience browsing data (whenever possible—you may not have data for some users). Set up context or keyword related recommendations as a fallback so users always see recommendations.
With these three steps, your existing content will go further while increasing user engagement. Need help or want more information? Contact us today.
Tim Turner is the Content program manager at TownNews.
