Organizing your content is great but even if you go through the trouble to meticulously categorize and tag every piece of content on your site, there will still be a section of your audience that just won’t be able to find it. We need another tactic…and that’s where displaying related content comes in.
Related content helps eliminate the problem by letting us create explicit relationships between items and then display that information to visitors. This makes it easier for them to find other content faster and with much less effort than digging through categorized lists or using yet another search box.
Here’s something to think about
The categories and tags used to organize your content may not match (or have anything to do with) the search terms your visitors used to discover it in the first place. If we heavily rely on our content organization to guide visitors through our site, this can quickly become a pretty serious problem.
Disregarding the fact that your subject matter may be different, here’s an example of what I mean:
Let’s say that someone finds an article on your site titled “Quantum launches new business notebook ‘Gluon’”…and that they found it by searching for “best business notebook”. (Because you’re an SEO master!) Now, suppose they liked the article and wanted to view some more information but, because we rely on categories, tags the only options the visitor has are:
- Click on a link to see every post in the “product launches” category - Bad
- Look through everything tagged with “blue” or “notebook” - Worse
There’s a possible third option. If we were using calls to action in an attempt to get visitors to “Buy now!”, they may also see a link that directs them to the “Buy it now” page. That would be nice but it’s probably not going to happen yet…especially if this is their first visit. (Or they really need to buy a new computer right this moment.)
Here’s what that page might look like:
See where I’m going with this?
If visitors aren't offered anything that seems interesting or related to what they're viewing, they’re going to start hammering on the “Back” button as soon as possible.
There’s a better way
To help keep that from happening, you could use related content to display a hand-selected list of items the visitor may be interested in.
Here’s a visual:
Moral of the story
A lot of time, money and effort is spent to attract visitors to your website. Don’t risk losing them after a single page view. Give them what they want…content. The relevant kind.
Check out this video to see how we help to tackle this problem in Telerik Sitefinity.
If you’d like to see some of the other ways Telerik Sitefinity is helping content authors and site administrators to take more control of their content, I encourage you to check out this YouTube playlist filled with previews of new things coming in 7.0.