Do you remember when Marie Kondo’s KonMari method of tidying up became a cultural phenomenon nearly a decade ago? It was all around how to better organize and declutter your spaces.
One of the staples of her method was to ask a simple question: Does this bring you joy?
There are plenty of companies that could benefit from taking Kondo’s approach when it comes to their website. Rather than making a great first impression, many sites instead welcome customers right into their cluttered closets full of extraneous pages, unclear copywriting, and mega-menu mazes. All of which do not bring customers joy.
We talk a lot about how customers have less patience than ever for negative experiences. Because there are so many competitor options available, it’s easy for consumers to move to a new brand if the first choice can’t give them what they need.
And one of the demands is finding what they want quickly and easily. As we learned in our 2024 CX Trends Report, 45% said unclear information around a product or service significantly impacts their experience in a negative way. Similarly, 42% said product transparency and visibility was hugely impactful in increasing trust with a brand.
What these data points tell us is that the approach you take to your website’s information architecture and content strategy has real influence on the satisfaction of consumers’ experiences.
Companies focus a lot of attention and energy on the design of their website. There’s a good reason for it. Your website is an extension of your brand, and the visual representation of that brand is important. But good design also comes in the form of content strategy. Your site can look great and feature motion graphics and other eye-catching elements, but if visitors don’t know what you’re selling or doing, none of that matters.
While high-ranking SEO is a great goal, taking the wrong path to get there can often lead to a content-bloated site. Marketing teams are trying to pack as many keywords and as much copy as they can onto a page in the hopes of placing better in search-engine results. But the more fluff and lingo you make consumers wade through to get to the point, the more issues you’re going to have with a site’s ease-of-use and as a result, conversions.
It’s valid to want your customers to be as informed as possible, especially as an expert of all of the amazing things your product can do! However, we’ve all had the experience of quickly scrolling past a food blogger’s lengthy story (exiting pop-up ads along the way) because all we really want is the recipe. It’s important to keep in mind that even though we have valuable content to share, we have to present it in a way that reflects the customer’s priorities.
Once your readers have gotten that information they care most about, then you can still provide all of the other benefits and details that they should know and get those SEO keywords represented. We just have to remember we’re designing sites for people, not search engines.
There are so many other factors that go into making an effective website, including the role that your internal teams play in delivering excellent customer experiences. You can dive even deeper into how to organize and optimize your website and digital experiences by downloading our latest ebook, How to Untangle Messy Website Experiences.
