A client’s recent website navigation re-structuring project provided an interesting demonstration of how the consumption of site content can be heavily influenced by external links.
An essential part of the project was the analysis of traffic performance and visitor behaviour using Google Analytics. The site in question serves a genuinely global audience and is recognised as the leading online resource in its niche. Partly because of the geographical spread of its users, the site’s traffic volumes are completely unaffected by seasonality and visitor behaviour is very unusually consistent. The quantitative analysis of visitor behaviour provided an objective basis for key decisions about re-engineering the site’s navigation and gave the client a much greater insight into the way their content was being consumed. One of the more unexpected findings came from an analysis of the most popular sections of the site’s discussion forum. By quite a significant margin, the two most visited sections related to very specialist niche topics. At first glance this seemed completely counter-intuitive. However, when considered in the context of the top referring sites (i.e. other websites linking to the client site and sending visitors to it), it became clear that the overall impression of “popular content” was being distorted by just a couple of external links. This is what I call Content Link Sensitivity. Fortunately, the external linking sites were highly respected and were delivering visitors with very well-qualified interest in the two areas of discussion. When planning a significant change to a site’s navigation and organisation of content, it’s vitally important to look at the full picture of visitor behaviour. For example, if the client data about most popular content had been taken at face value, the relative prominence of different sections within the navigation would have been completely inappropriate to the majority of visitors. The referring site information ensured that everything was kept in proper perspective. Thinking about the impact of external links in a broader sense, the client example also highlights that there can sometimes be a chicken and egg dilemma to resolve about content strategy: Should a site try to create content in order to generate incoming links (for the benefit of SEO and traffic volume)? Or should it generate content in reaction to the demand created by external sites?
