6 Tips to Optimize your Content’s Discoverability

You could have the best on-demand training content in the world, but it won’t do any good if your audience can’t find it! In today’s society, learners don’t always have the patience and persistence to go digging through several pages of your online training content. They want your learning management system (LMS) to be simple and intuitive. Most of the time, the hardest part of a Customer Education program is getting users to your site. Once you have them where they need to be, you don’t want to lose them because they can’t figure out what they should do or where they should start.

Make it easy for them to find what they need by putting content or a collection of content right on the homepage of your LMS and take advance of your users’ excitement to start (or continue) learning about your product.

Here are a few easy tips on how to optimize content to make sure your content isn’t sitting around collecting dust.

1. Surface your most commonly accessed content

Prioritize what it is you want your audience to be able to find when they come to your site and make sure it is front and center. Imagine you are a writer with limited space on your desk. You wouldn’t give the same amount of your desktop’s prime real estate to a calculator or a tape dispenser as you would your notebooks or pens, would you? Similarly, in your LMS, you want to prioritize the content that your audience needs the most so they can quickly and easily access the materials that matter to them.

2. Clear the clutter

Having a pleasing visual experience on your site is great, but you should also consider what kinds of things you host on your learning portal’s homepage. Make sure you don’t have outdated links or unnecessary content popping up. The fewer elements you have front and center, the more focus gets shed on the elements that are most important. This will cut down on user frustration and lead to a better learning experience.

3. Review your existing content

Over the course of months or years, your product or service is likely to change, and your content needs to be updated to reflect those changes. It’s also important to regularly evaluate your material and decide if it’s still relevant and necessary. Clogging up your pages and search results with old, out-of-date content can prevent your learners from finding what is truly important to them.

4. Recommend what might come next

Recommendations are one of the best ways to get learners to continue engaging with training, especially since Customer Education programs are usually thoughtfully planned and designed. When a learner finishes a course or module that you created, that is the perfect opportunity to recommend options for what they might want to learn next. By understanding your customer journey, you likely have a good idea of what the next step for them should be. Help your users take that next step by surfacing those recommendations clearly and at the most opportune time.

5. Look at your usage metrics

The data doesn’t lie! Take a look at some of your program metrics like registrations vs. completions. Are these numbers up or down from the previous month? Once your program is established and you are collecting more usage data, keep an eye on what is and isn’t working. If a new course that you thought was timely and relevant for your learners isn’t performing well, take a look at the data and try to figure out why. It may be that learners haven’t heard about it or it isn’t as discoverable as it should be.

Your data will likely also help you find courses and modules that aren’t performing well and should be evaluated, updated, or scrapped.

6. Listen to your learners

By offering a way for your learners to provide feedback after they complete training, you are able to get a sense of what they thought about it. While often that feedback can be something small, like a typo in a lesson, the feedback you receive over time from a larger audience can really give you a solid understanding of how your audience feels about that course or material. Take this data seriously since it is quite literally your audience telling you what they want!

Summary:

A learner’s ability to easily discover content that is relevant to them is essential to the overall health of your program. You can’t physically hold every learner’s hand and walk them through everything they need to learn, so creating an intuitive experience that empowers your audience to find what they need on their own is critical to ensuring they know what they need and how they can access it.

Try these 6 tips to ensure you’re optimizing the discovery of your training content:

1. Surface your most commonly accessed content
2. Clear the clutter
3. Review your existing content
4. Recommend what might come next
5. Look at your usage metrics
6. Listen to your learners