Content is everywhere. Very often this is the first way users interact with your site. That’s why it’s important to do a site content analysis. Website content analysis is a way to make sure that the content on your site is clear and well-received by your audience.
Content analysis – what is it?
Content analysis is a research method to see if the content on your site is working for your users. With content analysis, you can check – whether your site’s content is interesting enough, addresses their pain points directly, and provides enough context to help users successfully complete tasks on the site. Bad content will increase the site’s bounce rate and cause users to opt out of purchasing your products or services. Good content, on the other hand, will make the user interface (UX) intuitive and keep users from getting confused or distracted.
What content to analyze
Wherever there is content on the site, it’s worth analyzing it.
- Home page.
- Error messages.
- Menu buttons.
- Filters.
- Headers.
- Product or service pages.
Everything should be clear to your users on the site.
To decide what content to analyze, prioritize it according to the urgency and importance of the task to your users. If it’s a critical message, such as a payment error message, it’s vital that the content is easy to understand and helps the user achieve their goals.
Content Analysis Criteria
- Usability. Usability refers to checking how easy it is to interact with the content on the site.
- Readability
Checking that your content is readable to users. For example: If they get to the end of a sentence and then have to reread it over and over again to understand, then the quality of the content needs to be improved. Remember, users expect to be able to scan the text, not read every word.
- Accessibility.
Accessibility means whether your content can be used by as many people as possible. A high accessibility score ensures that people with disabilities can use your content. For example, having a feature that reads content aloud will be accessible to blind users. Or the inclusion of subtitles in video content will allow people with hearing loss to understand the content. Not only will this expand your audience, but it will create inclusive content that everyone can enjoy.
- Searchability
This has to do with search engine optimization (SEO) and determines whether or not people can easily find your site online. This will greatly increase the number of people who find and read your content. Tone and Voice You must also consider the tone and voice of your content.
- Tone and Voice. You should also consider the tone and voice of your content. Your company, has a voice that it uses to communicate with users. Therefore, it’s important to make sure that every piece of content resonates with your audience. Remember that your voice should remain consistent, but the tone can vary depending on the context. For example: a bank would have a different voice than a dating site.
Content analysis will help you understand the emotions you need to convey: more formal, informal, cool, educational, etc.
Content Analysis Methods
There are several methods of content analysis, each useful depending on your goals and usage scenario.
Method 1: Usability testing
You can run a content usability analysis to test the content with little modification. The purpose of this method is to assess how users interact with the site, how they find the information they want, and whether they encounter any confusion. With this method, you will assess whether the content is clear and allows people to use the site successfully. This method will provide you with qualitative information about what works and what doesn’t. And will give you an idea of what text needs to be changed or improved. Always keep behavior in mind: what users do during the test may contradict what they say.
Method 2: The “Close” test The “Cloze” test measures how well your users can understand a piece of text through context and prior knowledge.
In this method, you take a 125- to 250-word snippet of text and remove one every few words, usually every fifth or sixth. You present this text to the test participant and see how many missing words they can correctly guess. An overall score of 60% or higher is considered clear enough to satisfy users.
Method 3: The Highlighting Test
This method will allow you to see how people feel about your text. The voice of your text is important, and this test will show whether the text resonates emotionally with users. The gist of the method: You give participants the text and ask them to highlight in green what made them feel confident about the product and in red what made them feel less confident. At the end of this test, you’ll know which parts of the text need improvement first.
Method 4: Five-Second Test
In the five-second test, you present the text to your users and give them five seconds to look at it and then ask them questions. You can use this method to analyze landing pages, UI content, etc. The questions you ask can range from general, such as “What do you think of the page?” or “What do you remember?” to more specific, such as “What products are on sale at a discount?” It’s best to start the analysis with general questions to get general feedback and participants’ thoughts, and then ask more specific questions to see what information is causing problems for them. In this method, you test whether the information on your page can be quickly absorbed, comprehended or understood. Five-second tests are useful for understanding how your users perceive text at a glance and what value they remember.
Method 5: A/B Testing An A/B test involves creating two versions of text and testing them.
A/B tests provide quantitative data on which text performs better. This method of analysis provides useful metrics, such as click-through-rating (CTR), which will allow you to easily identify the winning option. To succeed, however, you need to have a large sample size for statistical significance. For example, Netflix is known for doing A/B testing of headlines to determine which ones best encourage users to watch videos.
Method 6: Readability Test
This method will test how easy your text is to read by favoring short words and short sentences. For the best results, use the readability test in combination with the other methods described above.