Increased demands and expectations from users, coupled with budgetary constraints and the requirement to demonstrate value for money and impact, mean that it is imperative that the services delivered are wanted, needed and valued by the audiences.
The publications below offer useful and practical information about researching digital audiences by key activities in the lifecycle of audience research.
The Audience Analysis Toolkit for public sector bodies has been developed for the Strategic Content Alliance by Curtis and Cartwright Consulting.
Reports
The Guide to Researching Audiences (v3.0, December 2009)
The Guide to Researching Audiences: Illustrative Case Study
The Guide to Researching Audiences: Case Studies
A Concise Guide to Researching Audiences (v3.0, December 2009)
A visualisation guide to researching audiences
Presentation slides
Audience Research for Practitioners
Audience Research: Why you should be doing it
Briefing papers
Briefing paper: Audience research for cultural sector practitioners
Briefing paper: Audience research for people experimenting with digital media
Briefing paper: Audience research for education and research practitioners
Briefing paper: Audience research for health library and knowledge practitioners
Briefing paper: Audience research for programme, service and research practitioners
Briefing paper: Audience research for senior managers
The Impact of Search Engine Optimisation on Organisations’ Websites (November 2009)
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of making a website attractive to search engines. The better a website is optimised, the higher its ranking will be in ‘organic’ search result listings – that is results in which sites are ranked according to the relevance of their content to the search terms used. The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has undertaken to investigate the hypothesis that implementing a few simple and inexpensive SEO techniques can increase an organisation’s web visibility and significantly augment traffic to the organisation’s website.
In support of this hypothesis, it undertook case studies on SEO in collaboration with the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) and three UK organisations: Swansea University (www.swansea.ac.uk), the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning through Design (CETLD – http://cetld.brighton.ac.uk) and the Archives Hub (www.archiveshub.ac.uk) and evaluated the case study participants’ current websites and recommend changes to optimise them and remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.
The need for this collaboration project was initiated due to the high instance of Internet users accessing information via a search engine and the number of websites, including those within the heritage and education institutional arenas, that are not currently constructed to ensure efficient search engine access. As a result, users can fail to find the information they are looking for and organisations can fail to communicate effectively with their user audience.
The Impact of Search Engine Optimisation on Organisations’ Websites (November 2009 v1.2)