Getting more from – or binning – your website’s people pages
Cultural organisations are more than just buildings, or the sum of all the creative work they produce. They're shaped, driven, and improved immeasurably by all the people behind them – from Artistic Directors to the people serving drinks at an interval.
It’s important to acknowledge who those people are, and to share their talents with the world. So, more and more on cultural websites, you’ll find profiles of staff and other key stakeholders.
These might be as simple as a few headshots and bios of the Senior Management Team on a single page. Or they might be a more extensive “People” section, with links to full-page profiles of the organisation’s entire staff and Board. It’s rare to find nothing at all about the people working at an organisation.
If you’re starting to think about planning-out your 'People' content, what are some of the questions to ask yourself?
One page, or many?
Individual people pages are often strong sources of organic search traffic. Let’s face it, how often do you get through a week at work without Googling somebody? Since your senior staff might not have much of a web presence beyond maybe a LinkedIn or other social profile, Googling “Joe Bloggs Marketing Manager” will probably bring up your organisation’s webpage about them near the top of the results.
So if you have a particularly high-profile member of staff — like an artistic director — who people are likely to be Googling a lot, then a profile page devoted to that person can be a great way to capture traffic that might not otherwise end up on your website at all. If that profile page can then serve up high quality content, along with links to upcoming events or donation pages, it might genuinely lead to income you wouldn’t have had otherwise.
This can be a double-edged sword, though. I worked with one arts organisation where all the trustees had their own profile pages. When one of those trustees got embroiled in an ugly workplace harassment claim that eventually got covered by the tabloids, people searching for the ugly tabloid story were inevitably finding the arts organisation’s website first. That’s organic search traffic you don’t want.
From a sustainability point of view, it’s also not great to keep fifty pages on your website about each member of staff, all with high-resolution headshots, when the reality is these are still relatively low-demand pages that won’t bring in as much traffic or income as other parts of the website.
So as a rule of thumb: if you have a few high-profile staff members or trustees who are likely to bring in a lot of positive search traffic, it can be worth giving them their own profile pages. (You should also monitor these pages in analytics to see if they’re actually doing that.) But if your main goal is to showcase the brilliant people who make your organisation tick, a single page listing everyone in one place will probably do the job.
What else do you want users to do?
People pages can also be a really useful tool if they’re a logical part of a user journey you want to prioritise. This is what I was talking about above, where people landing on the artistic director’s page might end up buying tickets to the new season of work. But where people pages come into their own is where specific people are linked to even more specific website conversions.
Let’s say you’ve got a space for hire in your building that you want to start earning more from. Absolutely your priority here should be a high quality hires page, clearly answering all the most common questions you get, and with a prominent call to action to make an enquiry.
But a profile page for your hires manager can also be a valuable part of the content strategy here. A name, face, and personal contact details can encourage more people to make an enquiry than an anonymous email address or form. If your hires manager is the sort of hands-on superstar who generates good worth of mouth, having a page for them on the website is useful too. And the more cross-linked pages you have that talk about hires, the more likely search engines are to surface your site for “hires” searches.
Likewise, having a profile page for your head of fundraising or head of partnerships can create similar opportunities for search optimisation and encouraging those personal enquiries and connections.
But as above, if you’re going to use people pages for specific goals like this, then make sure you track how well they’re working. If your people pages are just sitting there getting no traffic, it might be time to get rid of them.
What other content do you have?
It might sound obvious, but you shouldn’t go to the trouble of creating a profile for someone if you have nothing to say about them. A page with someone’s name, a fuzzy photograph, and a three-line bio you copy-and-pasted from the 2018 season brochure isn’t going to help anyone. So before you make a profile page, first ask yourself if it’s going to be worth reading.
But you should also consider what other pages on the site you can connect with an individual profile page.
One organisation I worked with, for example, awarded an annual fellowship that generated lots of extra content each year: an announcement of the years’ recipients, and profiles of each individual recipient, and showcase events where you could see those recipients’ creative work. Here, people pages were a great addition, because they sat at the centre of a web of other content, meaning it was much less likely that visitors to the site would hit a dead-end. (Particularly when they’d only arrived because they’d Googled the name of the recipient!)
Another great example is if there’s anyone at your organisation who’s a prolific contributor the blog. Even without a profile page you can make it easy for readers to filter posts by contributor. But with a profile page for that contributor, you use it as a jumping off point to further amplify the person’s most popular posts, and build a fandom. And, as above, if you can link that profile page to other parts of the site as well — events, or fundraising, or whatever your goals are for the site — then the profile page becomes a conduit between casual blog readers and engaged, paying audiences.
The bottom line
If individual profile pages will help you acheive one or more of the following, they’re absolutely worth doing*.
- capture more valuable search traffic,
- increase your key conversions,
- help visitors discover more relevant content
*As long as they contain strong content in their own right.
But if your main reason for having profile pages is to highlight the brilliant people who help your organisation run, perhaps a single page that shows everyone together might better accomplish that goal?
As with so much Content Strategy, the common thread between all these questions is: think before you create a page!
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