A lot of business owners make the mistake of thinking that an email opt-in form is the only way to set up gated content on a site – but that’s just not the case.

There are numerous ways to offer gated content on your website from a simple sign-up form to a paid membership service. The best approach for your gated content depends on several factors. We’ve outlined the pros and cons of each one below.

1. Email Sign-Up

Gated content refers to any website content that requires the visitor to provide some information in order to access it. The amount of information that a visitor needs to provide depends on the set up on your site.

The most popular type of gated content is an email sign-up form for access to an e-book or white paper. But no matter what type of gated content you’re offering, it needs to be compelling enough that a visitor is willing to give up some information. If the content isn’t appealing, then you won’t generate any form fills.

When setting up this item, connect your email marketing provider connected with the form, so that visitors can opt-in to your email marketing campaigns. Also, consider what the best format is for the content. For example, an e-book can be set up as a PDF and easily downloaded from a landing page.

As a best practice for GDPR and data privacy, you’ll also want to set up a double opt-in. This means that a visitor confirms their email. This can also cut down on the amount of spam you might otherwise receive.

If you are looking to dabble in gated content, the email opt-in is the first place to start. You can follow up with email campaigns to visitors who downloaded the e-book or white paper, guiding them to your products or services.

2. Free Membership System

A lot of business owners think of gated content only in terms of an email signup or paid membership, but there are benefits to starting with a free membership service.

With a free membership service, a visitor sets up a username and password to access a membership area of the site. This scenario has a few advantages over the email sign-up method.

First, you have access to more information than you would get with an email sign-up form. In the case of a free membership service, you have the option to track preferences on email marketing and content. It can also bypass the potential challenge of repeatedly requesting the same visitor’s email address for newly available gated content they may be interested in.

Free membership systems also offer the opportunity to create a sense of community through a members-only forum. If you’ve expanded beyond a single white paper or e-book and have a robust amount of worthy content, consider moving on to a free membership service.

3. Paid Membership Service

Paid membership services have all the benefits of a free membership (in terms of customer data,) but with the added benefit of generating revenue from your content. This option is a little more complex to set up and run, but worth it if you have enough interested parties.

First, select a payment gateway and decide on membership tiers and renewal standards. If you have a recurring subscription service, where members are paying monthly or annually for access to premium content, make sure the payment gateway can handle recurring billing well. Some payment processors require paid add-ons or are generally more difficult to use for subscription billing.

Of course, you’ll need to make sure the content is worthy of the payment and continue to show value, so that subscribers are motivated to renew. A great example of this is the premium TV streaming platforms where customers are on the lookout for new content.

Lastly, don’t forget about providing support for paying subscribers. Anytime you add payment processing to the site, you’ll have more customer questions on renewal, payment errors, and questions. You’ll want the membership area to include FAQ and customer support resources as well.

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4. Gated Video Content

Gated video content is a special form of premium content, requiring extra steps to keep it from non-paying members. With an e-book or web page, all you need to do is set it up behind a login form, and search engines will be blocked from indexing it, making it more difficult for Internet users to find the content.

While you might think that you could just host it directly on your own site, that’s not really a feasible option. Video files are extremely large, and you’ll face high hosting costs and extra challenges in streaming the video.  Uploading a video to YouTube or Vimeo and marking it unlisted isn’t enough, as it doesn’t block members from easily sharing the link with non-members.

One of the best options is to sign up for a paid Vimeo account. On Vimeo, you’ll have the option to embed a video while keeping it truly locked from non-members.  You may not have to go to these extremes if you have an email sign-up or free membership, but they’re good to keep in mind for paid membership content.

5. Learning Management System

A learning management system is the most complex set up, but it can provide a comprehensive experience for visitors and a steady revenue stream for your business.

With this approach, gated content is organized into courses where viewers are led through different articles, videos and worksheets to learn a new skill set. But learning management systems require quite a bit of extra work and expenses on your end, so they’re best offered for a fee. There are two ways to charge for your content: à la carte or full-access membership.

A learning management system typically requires an additional plugin or software on your site. For WordPress sites, LearnDash is the most popular resource currently available to manage courses directly on the WordPress site.

There are also DIY platforms available, such as Teachable and Kajabi, which allow you to offer courses on their platform. With these options, you won’t need any plugins, as you’ll be directing potential users offsite to these third party platforms.

Offering a learning management system requires a larger investment in time and money, but it’s a great option if your content is most easily consumed as a course – and if you have the ability to regularly update the courses.

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Balance Between Free & Gated Content

Selecting the best gated web content approach depends on numerous factors, including your current budget, the type of relationship you’d like to foster, and the type of content that you can create.

There is a balance to offering free versus gated website content. Too much gated content on your site can cause frustration if visitors don’t want to give their personal information away for information that is accessible for free elsewhere.

Focus on creating high-quality free content that guides visitors to your best premium content, whether that is a white paper, paid membership service, or paid courses.

The post 5 Ways To Offer Gated Content On Your Site appeared first on Relevance.

If you haven’t considered accessibility best practices, then there are most likely barriers that make it harder for certain individuals to enjoy your content.

Implementing the following accessibility tips will not only help to broaden your audience, but they can also help with search engine optimization and conversion.

1. Readability & Structure

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) outline the best practices for website accessibility. WCAG released the latest version (2.1) of their guidelines in 2018, with optimized approaches for all types of content from text to audio and video. One of its fundamental goals is the ease of comprehension of all web content.

While all marketers have this goal in mind when writing and sharing content, there are several steps that can make your content easier to read.

First, use shorter sentences and paragraphs wherever possible in your writing. Longer sentences and sections can be difficult to understand for those with learning or cognitive disabilities.

Second, organize and structure the content into sections with clear headlines and subheadlines. Using H2s and H3s to structure your content will also help assistive technologies and search engines crawl and interpret the content.

If you are publishing articles on your own site and you have a WordPress site, consider using an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO. Once installed, this plugin provides a readability score for every page or blog post and provides recommendations for improving the overall readability. You can follow the recommendations to improve the article for both accessibility and search engines.

2. Videos and Media

Today, video is a huge component of any content marketing strategy. Captions are the most critical accessibility best practice for video content whether it is a live or previously recorded video. Users who are hard of hearing or deaf depend on the captions in order to understand your video.

When you add captions to your video, you’ll typically see higher engagement rates in general because a lot of users will turn on the captions if they are in an environment where they need the volume to be negligible or muted.

Luckily, it’s easy to add captions to videos on most platforms. After uploading a video to YouTube, you can turn on the automatic captions feature and then clean up any of the caption text if the automatic text is incorrect. For social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, you can upload a captions file along with the video when sharing content on these platforms. The only challenging platform for captions is Instagram, but there are numerous apps or video editing tools that allow you to add captions directly to a video.

In addition to video, offer a text version of any audio content such as podcasts or radio clips. Providing a written transcript of a podcast or video is also helpful for SEO since search engines are not able to crawl a video or audio file.  

3. Images and Color Contrast

Images and design elements are a great way to enhance any piece of content and visually tell a story. However, you need to make sure all images and media content can be interpreted for those who have vision difficulties.

Start by adding alternative text for all images included in your articles and content. Image alt tags or alternative text is critical for accessibility because screen readers use the tags to inform a user of visual content. The alt tag should describe the image and convey the important meanings that a user would gain from the image.

It’s okay to put text directly on an image, but you need to make sure that the content also appears in a textual format or that the alt tag clearly states the text on the image. Otherwise, users who cannot view the visual content will be missing out on your meaning.

Next, make sure there is adequate contrast for all text or images of text in your content. A contrast ratio of 4.5:1 is the minimum standard set by the WCAG 2.1 for normal text or images of text. With approximately 10% of the world population color blind, contrast ratios are a critical best practice in any piece of content.

4. Forms & PDFs

Whether using a pop-up form, offering an e-book download, or including a newsletter signup, your marketing campaigns will most likely consist of a form, at some point. There are several accessibility best practices to follow for website forms, regardless of their purpose.

First of all, you should not use placeholder text for the form labels. You’ll often see a form design with placeholder text where the content or label for a form field is in the actual field (see image example). This is a poor practice for accessibility because once a user starts to fill out the form, the label for that field disappears. This can create a lot of challenges for users with a learning or cognitive disability. Instead, label each form field and make sure there are error messages set up to help guide the user along.

As part of a marketing funnel, you may offer a downloadable white paper or e-guide after they fill out a form. These documents are typically provided as a PDF file.

PDF files actually have their standards for accessibility, as well. Unfortunately, a lot of older PDFs, especially those with form fields, don’t follow the new standards. Adobe Acrobat is one of the best programs to convert a PDF into an accessible format.

5. Comments & Feedback

After you’ve tended to your content and functionality, the next step is to keep an eye out for bugs and tend to quality control issues. Just as mobile devices and tablets are changing, screen reader, assistive technology and website platforms are all changing, too, leaving a lot of room for a lot of little fixes, updates and upgrades.

One of the best ways to ensure that your content stays accessible is to allow users to share problems. There are a few ways that you can receive feedback from your users. If you have a comment feature on your blog or anywhere that you are posting content, keep an eye out for technical issues.

On your own website, consider adding an Accessibility Feedback form and putting a link to this form in the footer of your site. This simple form provides a way for users to report accessibility issues as they arise.

In addition to welcoming user feedback, you can use free online tools to monitor the accessibility of your site. The Google Chrome Lighthouse Audit tool allows you to scan any page of your website for free. The accessibility scores are based on the WCAG 2.1 standards and are accompanied by recommendations to improve your site’s accessibility.

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Expand Your Audience

With any marketing campaign, the goal is to reach the farthest audience as possible with your content and work. Considering the best practices for accessibility will not only help you expand your audience, but it will also help you establish goodwill with users and readers of your content.

The post How to Make Your Content ADA Accessible appeared first on Relevance.

Appeal to Search Engines & Deliver a Great User Experience

1. Be Strategic with High-Level Messaging

High-level messaging on a web page typically refers to the headlines, subheadings and calls to action. This messaging has two functions. It anchors and guides your visitor’s attention through the site, and it also supports on-site optimization, so this is a great place to start.

From a UX-standpoint, web designers use visual hierarchy, that is, they arrange the graphic elements in order of importance. The goal of visual hierarchy is to influence the order in which the human eye perceives information. Headline texts are typically in the largest font, with subheadings in slightly smaller fonts. This helps a web visitor to process information quickly as they scan the page.

From an SEO perspective, the main headline on a web page is typically the H1 tag. H1 is an HTML tag that indicates a heading on a web page to the search engines. Before working on your high-level messaging, do some keyword research and think about the focus of each page. Be strategic and include keywords in your headline, while keeping the language clear and accessible. Your visitors will be able to tell the difference between useful, informative headlines and overstuffed, keyword-laden headlines just for optimization purposes.

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2. Present Content in Creative Ways

One of the big battles between SEO experts and UX strategists is over the amount of content to have on a web page. You need enough content so that the search engines can understand what the page focuses on, but you also need to be clear and concise enough so that your visitors stay engaged.

If a particular page calls for a lot of content, get creative about where and how you place the information. On your home page, the first 4-5 panels or sections of the page should correlate to the most important pages of your site. Because web visitors tend to scroll on websites, it’s common for a visitor to scroll through the home page and use it as a gateway into the internal pages. After these key panels on the home page, add a few more sections with less essential but useful content in order to increase the amount of content on the page.

On internal pages, a Frequently Asked Questions panel with an accordion is a great way to add more content while keeping a web page clean and easy to read. An accordion hides the answer to a question and only opens up to reveal the answer when a visitor clicks on the question or a plus symbol. It’s not only a user-friendly solution but keeps the content searchable to search engines as well.

3. Create a Clean Navigation

A clean, intuitive navigation is a critical part of creating a positive user experience on a website. If a web visitor has a difficult time navigating the website, it’s unlikely that they’ll stick around. In the past, websites were designed with lots of pages in the navigation because visitors were viewing sites on desktops and didn’t mind clicking through drop down menus.

Today, the majority of visitors view websites on smaller devices and expect to find what they are looking for as quickly as possible. For your SEO goals, you may want lots of pages on your website – but you don’t necessarily need all of those pages in your navigation.  Avoid having lots of drop downs in the menu; they’re especially difficult to navigate on smaller devices.

If you have a larger site and need to showcase lots of service or product pages, consider adding a mega menu to the navigation. There are different types of mega menus and they offer a more expansive drop down interface for visitors.

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4. Use Your Blog

Having an active blog supports both SEO and UX. From an SEO standpoint, a blog is an easy way to add new content to your website on a consistent basis, which search engines value. Strategically creating long-form articles focused on certain keywords also supports search engine rankings, as does linking internally between different blog posts on your site.

On the UX side of things, a blog is a visitor-friendly tool for organizing information. Rather than putting content into tons of pages that are difficult to find and navigate, place this content in blog posts. You can organize your information by categorizing the blog posts and adding tags. Implementing a search field for your blog is another way to help visitors easily access the information they’re looking for.

Lastly, video blogs are a great way to generate consistent posts. You can film several videos at the same time and then post each one separately. However, make sure that you write and post the transcription of the video along with embedding the video file. Search engines aren’t able to crawl videos, so you need to include the transcript.

5. Focus on Mobile

The mobile user experience is one area where SEO and UX are slowly converging. In 2016, Google announced mobile-first indexing, which means that Google predominantly uses the mobile version of your website for indexing and ranking. Mobile-first indexing is now extremely prominent, so you need to consider the mobile experience of your site for both SEO and user experience.

For this reason, it’s important to add content in strategic ways that optimize the mobile experience of your site. When designing your website, work with a web designer that is skilled with mobile-wise design.

A mobile-wise approach factors in how all the content, images and elements look on different device sizes from the outset. The placement of objects and the use of white space are both critical on mobile because visitors tap buttons or links with their thumb. If objects are too close together, your site will be difficult to navigate on a smaller device.

Finally, we’ve all seen people walking and looking down at their phone. Creating an intuitive navigation and experience is so important on mobile because your visitor’s attention may be fragmented while they try to navigate the site.

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You Can Achieve a Balance

In the end, a little bit of forethought is all you need to resolve the battle between SEO and UX.

With clear, SEO-savvy messaging, a robust blog, and clean mobile-wise navigation and content layout, you can satisfy both SEO protocol and maintain a friendly and accessible UX.

By focusing on these 2 elements, you can not only improve your search engine results but also engage and convert the traffic in the end. There’s no need to divide your loyalty between the two goals. Properly balance your SEO and UX, and you can have it all.

The post How to Balance SEO and UX on Your Website appeared first on Relevance.

Recent studies have shown that web visitors are 82% more likely to convert to customers if they’ve chatted with your business first. Because of the popularity of instant messaging and social media, live chat is becoming a preferred mode of communication for web visitors.

But you’ll see the best results from live chat if you put in the effort up-front and train your team on the following best practices.

1. Customize Live Chat to Fit Your Brand

There are lots of live chat options out there, but you’ll want to choose a system that can integrate seamlessly with your website.

Your live chat should look like a natural extension of your business’s brand and messaging, so customizing the chat features is a critical step. Thankfully, with most live chat platforms, you can upload your company logo and customize the colors of the buttons and text in the chat window.

In addition to the colors & branding, review all the messages and prompts in order to convey an authentic brand. A lot of businesses make the mistake of leaving default settings turned on, which can give the wrong impression of the business. Brand consistency is extremely important today, as a recent Lucidpress report found a company’s revenue will increase by 23% on average due to consistent brand representation.

Lastly, set up a profile for each of your live chat agents or whoever on your team will be managing the chats. Web visitors are more likely to start or continue a chat if they see a picture of a person, so consider adding actual photos of your agents when setting up the profiles.

2. Create a Great User Experience

The overall user experience on your website is influenced by many factors, including design, user interface and navigation. Ideally, your live chat platform will enhance your visitor’s experience, not take away from it.

Keeping this in mind, consider how the live chat fits in with the rest of your site. First, it’s best to turn off any sound associated with the chat, as having a lot of sound and movement on a web page is distracting to a visitor.

Second, give your visitors a gap between when they appear on your site and when the chat box pops up. For most live chat systems, you’ll be given the option to decide how long to wait before the prompt appears. A good rule of thumb is 5 or more seconds: it gives the visitors a bit of time to evaluate the site and your business.

Finally, keep testing different settings and messaging on your live chat to determine which options result in the most chat conversations and in turn, conversions.

3. Train Your Team Well

A live chat system is most effective in the hands of capable live chat agents. So, take the time to train your team on how to manage the chat and communicate with customers. Response time and customer satisfaction play a critical role in whether a visitor stays engaged and converts from visitor to prospect to buyer.

A visitor expects a rapid response time of just a few seconds, so if your agent is online, they need to be tuned in and ready to communicate. In fact, 82% of customers rate an immediate response as very important when asking a customer service question, according to recent research by HubSpot.

Customer satisfaction on chat requires a bit more forethought. Consider the different chat scenarios that your business will receive and create scripts for how agents can best answer the most common questions.

Your agents will also need to know whether to guide the visitor on to any next steps. If you’re in a service business, the next step may be to connect the visitor with the sales department or with a tech team to help troubleshoot a situation.

A lot of live chat systems even have resources in place to help your team manage chats, such as transferring a chat to a specific agent or setting up shortcuts for common responses.

4. Set Up Offline Features

You don’t need to be tied to your desk (or even to a mobile app) in order to get all the benefits from this amazing resource. Most live chat systems have customizable offline settings that are supportive to your visitor and still help to promote conversions.

The automatic display will probably say “leave a message” or “start a ticket” when the live agents aren’t available online. While this is a great start, it’s worth changing the offline settings to better suit your business.

One option is to set up a simple form which your visitors can fill out. A surprising number of visitors make use of this form option, giving you the opportunity to follow up with them once you or your agent is back online.

Another popular option is to set up a chat bot. A chat bot is an automated bot that can be customized to provide answers based on common questions or guide a visitor to an online resource.

However, be mindful that bots have limited capacities. In fact, new research by NewVoiceMedia revealed that 75% of respondents would prefer to interact with a real agent than a chat bot, so when possible, get your agents on live chat and use offline tools carefully.

5. Personalize the Experience on Chat

These days, web visitors and customers are expecting a more personalized experience on websites. A survey conducted by Segment found that 44% of consumers would give a company repeat business after receiving a personalized experience. You can deliver on these expectations with live chat customizations.

Once you set up your chat and find a working rhythm, test new ways to engage visitors on chat. For instance, try setting up a prompt on live chat where you offer an article or e-book link to visitors once they’ve been on the site for a certain period of time.

You can even set up custom message prompts that appear if a visitor comes from a particular traffic source or if they are a returning visitor.

The likelihood of converting visitors will continue to increase as you keep testing new ways of engaging your visitors. You may be surprised what works best for your business.

A Resource for Every Business

While large corporations have been reaping the benefits of live chat for a long time, this growing website trend is becoming more and more accessible and helping drive conversions for businesses of all types and sizes.

Even with a small team that can’t be on live chat 24/7, it’s still worth using it to connect with visitors when you can – and it will definitely be worth those new prospects who just needed a little extra contact.

By following the steps above, you’ll have a new tool that will not only benefit your web visitors, but also your team, helping them to feel more connected to their potential clients and customers in real time.

The post How to Optimize Live Chat for Conversions appeared first on Relevance.