Content and SEO

  • Optimize the content!

    Answer the following questions as a litmus test:

    1. Why is this content needed? What is its purpose? Ideally, all content should include a call to action, including a link or button that can be used to track customer engagement.
    2. Who is the content for? Would they say the content is valuable or necessary?
    3. Is user experience (UX) or user interaction (UI) design help needed? ALL content affects the customer experience. Even a line of copy can affect the UX dramatically. Consult with designers early and often!
    4. What kind of content governance is needed? If your content includes a date, be sure there's a Rally story to remove or update any time-sensitive messaging.
    5. What is the expected audience size or conversion rate? Consult WebTrends to baseline the customer experience and determine what volume of customer traffic and click-through rate that can be expected after content additions or updates are published. If engagement is lower than expected, content should be revisited to re-word the copy, re-evaluate design, and iterate or A/B test as necessary.

    Titles/meta descriptions

    1. Use unique page titles and H1s (only one H1 per page).
    2. Make sure H1s, H2s, and standard HTML best practices are being used on page and are being built into CSS templates and widgets. Avoid including more than 2 H2s per page. If you have more than that, it's a signal your content is overloaded and additional pages or different navigation or design help is needed.
    3. URLs, H1s, titles, descriptions, and content on page should match exactly or be closely related in theme.
    4. Add meta description copy into Ektron BEFORE publishing. Align it to the correct character count per Google guidelines. Adding meta description copy after publishing is not a best practice and will result in unclear or even nonsensical Google search-engine result (SERP) content, which gives our competition an advantage over us.

    Links

    Link labels should have context and be meaningful. Let users know where they can expect to land after they click or tap.

    • Good: Find out how to enter for a chance to win a trip to Disney World.
    • AVOID!: Click here to find out how to win a trip to Disney World. ("Click here" is not helpful for users who have low vision and use software to help them consume web content.Using "click here" or "learn more" as link copy also often forces you to write longer than you would had you used a contextual link.)
    • AVOID!: Want to find out how to win a trip to Disney World? Learn more

    Content performance

    As you make changes to site content, ask yourself these performance-based questions:

    1. Does the change or page add valuable, useful content that's relevant to the user's goals?
    2. How will you measure success after the change is made? What is the current page performance? Measure your success using key performance indicators (KPIs) from our content analysis tools including WebTrends, Screaming Frog, Content Insight, and Google Analytics. (Note that WebTrends is our preferred site analytics tool, as our pages are fully tagged to measure click-through and visits, down to the on-page link level. Contact Karlyn Vasan or Erica Jorgensen if you need WebTrends training.) KPIs include audience size, bounce rate, exit rate, time on page, unique visitors, return visitors, sales leads, visitor flow (previous and next-page visits), and other conversion-related actions like registration, signups for explanations of benefits, etc. that save Premera money, reduce customer service calls, drive revenue, show health plan value, and save customers time and money. 
    3. Is A/B testing needed because the page receives lots of visitors, is a high performance page, or could have significant financial impacts? (All open-enrollment call to action buttons should be A/B tested.)
    4. Does the H1 title on the page provide the visitor a short description of what they will find on the page, or does the content lead to a major disconnect on the customer's end? Put yourself in the customer's shoes. Test if you're not sure.

    Sentences

    1. Immediately give the user some helpful context. Why do they need to know this information? How does it affect them? What actions do they need to take?
    2. Envision your copy on a mobile device first.
    3. Ensure the content communicates how their Premera or LifeWise plan provides value (saving them time, hassle, or money)
    4. Write in active voice. Refer to the Let's Be Clear writing guidelines.
    5. Write short, simple sentences. Try to keep your sentences to about 10 words. Keep cognitive load to a minimum.
    6. Omit unnecessary words. Cut the fat.
    7. Keep paragraphs short. For web and mobile content, one-sentence paragraphs are fine.

    SEO is customer-centric and is an industry-standard, long-range strategy for customer acquisition and engagement. It usually builds over 6-12 months, and can take that much time to recover if basic best practices are not followed.

    1. How to Build URLs

    URLs should be named consistently. Use all lowercase letters. Use hyphens in-between words, not underlines. URLs should follow the same patterns as navigation. For non-secure pages, do not use special characters like space,$,%,&,!,#,+.

    Correct: https://www.premera.com/wa/member/manage-my-account/forms/
    Incorrect: https://www.premera.com/wa/Manage_my_account/Forms/

    2. Changing URLs

    Changing URLs has significant impacts on our pages' chances of showing up in web searches, and can break external links to our websites.  Frequently changing URLs can lead to broken links, a fragile site, and broken external/internal links, and will erode domain authority (the overall measure of our sites' health that signals to Google and search engines whether our sites deserve to be found by the public.

    Please use 301 HTTP status code redirects when a page is removed, replaced, or consolidated.  The forwarding URL should point to the most relevant page; this is called mapping URLs.  If a match can't be found then point to a main landing page or home URL such as Premera.com/visitor.

    *Minimize redirects…use only when necessary!  Sites with many redirects are penalized by Google and other search engines. 

    3. Vanity URLs

    Should be avoided like the plague. They may be used for printed/mail campaigns, but are far from ideal. For digital campaigns and all other content from outside partners, we should use fully qualified URLs (the ones we WANT Google/Bing to index). Using vanity URLs erodes our search engine optimization efforts.

    Example of a fully qualified URL: https://www.premera.com/wa/visitor/shop-for-plans/HSA/
    Vanity for Print: https://www.premera.com/HSA

    4. Vanity domains

    Using 3rd-party vendors for site content doesn't help build the Premera.com or Lifewise domain authority. It's good to have promos, blogs, newsletters, etc. built on our proprietary domains, rather than 3rd party WordPress, white label, co-branded sites, especially to provide a steadier volume of visitor traffic in months outside of open enrollment.

    5. Removing URLs from search results

    Please work with Karlyn Vasan and Sarah Frohlich when removing more than one page. When pages are removed, updates will be needed in the Google Webmaster account that's maintained by Sarah.

    • If the page no longer exists, make sure that the server returns a 404 (Not Found) or 410 (Gone) status. HTTP status code. Non-HTML file (like PDFs) should be completely removed from your server.
    • If the page still exists, use robots.txt to help prevent Google from crawling it. Note that robots.txt requests are not always honored by Google; they are never guaranteed. If you don't want to run the risk of content being crawled by Google, don't publish it.

    6. Navigation

    Changes need to be reviewed & approved by UX team & SEO advisor. Frequent and/or significant changes in navigation & URLs can lead to broken links, fragile site, and broken external/internal links, and will erode domain authority.

    Consider when adding content:

    • Can the new content replace current content on or be added to an existing page?
    • Global nav, secondary nav, page titles, H1 titles, and URLs need to match in order to encourage crawling and indexing by Google

    7. Site errors

    All pages should be coded to display the friendly version of the Error page for all 400 & 500 HTTPS errors. This allows our customers and bots crawling our sites to return later, and eliminates dead-ends. Team should audit and clean up HTTPS errors regularly. The 400 and 500 errors should be top priority.

    8. Site performance

    Site speed is an SEO ranking factor. Be considerate of load time; reduce custom code whenever possible! Premera E-com has set targets of page load times of X seconds or less. Average load time for websites ranking in Google at Position 1 is between 9-13 seconds. IIS Log files are freely available on all localhost, dev, ait and ACPT. Free log parser Lizard - http://www.lizard-labs.net/log_parser_lizard.aspx.

    UX/SEO Resources