How Reading Patterns Can Help Us Optimize Content for Organic Search — Whiteboard Friday

A good way of understanding how your users are engaging in the content to begin with because you could use any of these as a template. It’s not necessarily going to reflect your users, though. So, you could use tools like Hotjar, which has a decent heat mapping feature to understand where users are spending the majority of their time.

But also then things like Google Analytics 4, where you can set up an event for when users scroll, that then gives you a good understanding of not only people aren’t bouncing once they’ve read like the first few lines of your content, so those F Pattern users, but also then where are you structuring your content that facilitates that scroll for those Layer Cake users.

What that will do is not just show you the stuff that’s really, really good, which is great to take to your boss to show success, but also then the places where you need to do better, which is where then content optimization will come into it. It’s never going to be a one-size-fits-all kind of thing.

But the best way to do it is optimize, maybe compare the last month’s worth of user engagement data with a month after optimization and compare them. And if the month after is better, amazing. If it’s not, it’s not a terrible thing because you can just go back and reoptimize. Maybe the way that your users have been consuming content has changed over the past few months. Maybe you’ve got a competitor that’s a lot more focused on short-form video content. So then, you want to start using that and encouraging your social team to get involved in content ideation. It could go on and on and on.

But using stuff like Hotjar and GA4 will be crucial to understanding not just how your users are engaging in your content in a positive way, but also a negative way, and give you all of that opportunity to improve. I think that’s pretty much everything I’ve got.

I really hope that was useful. If you want to carry on this conversation, have a chat with me about content design, I’m on Twitter @chloeivyroseseo, or you can follow me on LinkedIn. I really hope this was helpful. Thanks, everyone. Bye.

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