UX + Content Strategy: How to Use Your Content Analytics to Optimize your User Experience

User Experience (UX) is at the heart of every website design and strategy – and it should be. It is the single most important aspect of ensuring your users have a positive experience with your brand digitally. This is why many businesses kick off a website redesign with a UX evaluation. 

Generally, UX encompasses everything from page load times to user journeys to the content on your website. During a UX evaluation, most businesses focus heavily on the architecture, navigation, user flows, and appearance of their website. However, this leaves out one major website feature: your content. The very thing that the person came to your website to find. 

Evaluating how your content impacts your UX, both positively and negatively, is an important step to ensuring that the journeys you create on your website utilize your content most effectively. 

The good news is the same data you use to track your site metrics and set key performance indicators (KPIs) are the data you can use to evaluate your content from a UX perspective. This is called a content audit, and its purpose is to explore how users are using the content you create.  It will help you identify the content that has the most value to your users, the content that is working the most effectively for your business, and the content that is important to your business but isn’t working at all. 

This information can help you establish how your content fits into your UX to optimize your user’s experience. Let’s look at the variables you should be considering during your site audit. 

Page Traffic: 
Page traffic is a relatively straightforward metric; it counts how many users are coming to a specific page. Most businesses use page traffic as a metric to evaluate and set KPIs as well as identify how people are accessing the page (i.e., from search or from an internal page). However, it also plays a key part in the user experience. Page traffic data allow businesses to identify the information that is the most valuable to their customers. Once this information has been identified, businesses can incorporate it into their UX design, utilizing the content and design to drive users down a path that is beneficial to both the user and the business. 

Bounce Rates and Exit Rates:  
While similar, bounce rates and exit rates are not the same thing. A bounce rate is the percentage of people who land on the page organically and leave the site afterward without visiting any other pages on your website. In other words, they come to your site, they view one page (the one they landed on), and then they exit your site. Basically, all bounce rates are exits, but not all exits are bounce rates. 

Which takes us to exit rates. Exit rates refer to the percentage of people who have landed on that page from an internal link and then left your site after visiting that page. It is the last page they view on your website. Think of bounce rates as from an external source and exit rates as from an internal source. 

High bounce rates (above 60%) generally tell one of three stories: 



1. Users are getting the information they need and leaving (more common behavior among researchers and less common among customers or potential customers). 
2. Your page does not have the information your users are looking for. 
3. The page has such a poor user experience (e.g., the information is hard to find) that users prefer to find the information elsewhere or move on without it altogether. 

Exit rates tend to be less informative in terms of a content audit. A high exit rate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It may be perfectly reasonable for people to leave a website after visiting a specific page (for example, if they’ve made a purchase or contacted customer support). However, if it’s unclear why people are leaving the site after visiting a page, you should evaluate the purpose of that page, its content, and the path the user took to get there to see if you can narrow down what is causing people to leave. In this scenario, heat mapping may also be helpful.  

Time on Page: 
The time the user spends on the page can help you identify whether your page contains the information that people are looking for. On average, users spend 50-60 seconds looking at a page. The longer the user looks at the page, the more relevant the information is to them. In general, if a user cannot find the information they are looking for by briefly scanning the page (within a few seconds), they will leave. A low time on page can signal that you need evaluate whether the page design and UX has made it difficult to find the information or whether the content, key words, or tagging needs to be improved. 

Tying the Pieces Together: 
This brings us to combining all three of these metrics to perform a content audit as part of a UX evaluation. Combined, these metrics can help a business identify pages that they can improve, delete, or utilize more effectively within the UX. 

Each combination of these three metrics tells a different story and should elicit a different response in UX design. For example, pages that have high traffic coupled with very low time on page and a high bounce rate are likely performing well in search rankings because of key words or tagging, but they are performing poorly on your site because they have the wrong information, or the information is not easily accessible. 

Alternatively, pages that have high traffic, high time spent on page, and high bounce rates should be evaluated for user experience. These pages obviously have value to users, and businesses should try to identify what’s causing people to leave the site so they can alter the page to effectively drive users to other portions of the website. 

Content audits should be performed with the business’ goals in mind first. Identify the content that has the most value to the business. Then compare that content to the story the data are telling regarding what content the customers value most. Many businesses are often surprised to discover that pages they would never rank as an important page are some of the highest performing pages on their site. 

Using and understanding these content metrics during a UX evaluation can be a key part of designing an optimal user journey, and they can help refine how your business uses content on its website. While content metrics are often overlooked in favor of the more prominent user experience components of a site (the architecture, navigation, and appearance), they can actually help identify valuable content that can help inform user journey. 

If you’re looking for more information about UX evaluations and content audits before you start building your new site, please reach out. We have a full team of UX designers and content strategists that can help you begin your journey.