Make it easy for journalists to find information in your website

Create a helpful About Us section in your website

Most websites provide an About Us section, but the pages often do a poor job of clearly communicating the most important information about the organization. Additionally, many people now seek out company information not only from the About Us section, but also from third parties who might provide an honest, unbiased perspective about the organization.

The journalists’ search is helped immensely when your website has a clearly labeled media section that can provide answers. Their job is also helped when you have an easily found About Us section on your home page.

The top five reasons journalists give for visiting an organization’s website are to:

• find a PR contact (name and telephone number);
• check basic facts about the organization (eg spelling the name of the CEO, checking where head office is located, etc);
• discover the organization’s version of events;
• check financial information;
• download images to use as illustrations in stories.

In a 2019 review of About Us pages, the Nielsen Norman Group found an increasing amount of skepticism from users. Organizations that stood out favorably used ways to help them appear authentic and transparent, including:

• Storytelling
• Using realistic photography
• Showcasing unbiased reviews
• Offering several channels to connect with a real person in the company.

Structuring and labeling About Us content

The Nielsen Norman Group recommends that sites always include at least a main About Us page, but depending on the amount of content you have, your users’ information needs, the size, and tenure of your organization, you may decide to include subcategory pages underneath About Us. NN/g suggest providing About Us information at 4 levels of detail:

1. Tagline on homepage: A few words or brief sentences that summarize what the organization does

2. Summary on About Us page: 1–2 short, scannable paragraphs at the top of a main About Us page, that offer a bit more detail about the organization’s goals and main accomplishments

3. Subcategory pages under About Us: Including detailed information on subcategory pages can give users answers to their questions when they want to learn even more about your company. Examples of appropriate subcategory pages that could live underneath the main About Us category include Mission and Values, Company History, Leadership and Team, Investor Relations, News, Careers, Environmental Sustainability, and Diversity and Inclusion. For smaller sites and organizations, subcategory content can live directly on a single About Us page, rather than being broken up into individual pages. In either case, if your organization places a heightened emphasis on any of the subcategory pages we mentioned, these subcategories should be easily findable from links in the main navigation (instead of just being subcategories underneath About Us). This often happens with pages such as News, Investor Relations, or Careers to name a few.

4. About Us links in the footer: Users heavily rely on the footer as a fallback. When people can’t find the information they need from the main navigation, they immediately scroll down to the footer to find it.

Additionally, it’s important to emphasize that most users will rarely click on obscurely named links such as Corporate Governance. People don’t understand jargon terms and struggle to decipher meaning from unclear link names. Use explicit link labels; they help all users navigate and are less burdensome even for sophisticated users, such as investors or business journalists.

Examples of some great About Us pages

• You can see 25 examples of creative About Us pages in the Search Engine Journal website.
• Likewise, you can read HubSpot’s post on “15 of the Best ‘About Us’ & ‘About Me’ Pages and How to Make Your Own.”

Essential to set up a useful newsroom so journalists can find information in your website

Image, right: The simple layout of Apple’s newsroom makes it easy to find corporate and marketing information.

Organizations spend a lot of money on websites, but unfortunately, the media sections of websites often fail to provide the most basic information for media use. You need to make it easy for journalists to quickly find information in your website. The media area of the website needs to be simple, clean and free of the excessive puffery found on many websites.

The media area should obviously contain current and recent (within the past 12 months) news releases with a searchable archive facility of earlier releases. It can contain the full text, in HTML format, of recent speeches by the chairman or CEO, with an option to access sound bites of the speech highlights. It can contain copies of formal reportage such as annual and half-yearly reports to the stock exchange, the environmental protection authority and other government bodies.

Routine information should be readily accessible in the media area. For instance, details on the background of top management, with their high-quality photographs, can be included in online media kits. Copies of your organizational structure and policies may be included. A corporate calendar of events may be available. Links can be established to photographs of products.

A diligently maintained media area may also contain other value-adding information such as story ideas, file footage of your organization’s operations and perhaps some organizational case studies.

Don’t forget astute use of external links

Journalists don’t take an organization’s own word as truth. They access media releases mainly to see how the organization is trying to position itself. The credibility of the organization improves when the media area of the website contains links to external sources, including media coverage, since articles from third party sources such as newspapers, magazines and television coverage are more credible than the organization’s own information output.

Make it easy for journalists to find information in your website

Journalists usually work to tight deadlines. They need fast answers and don’t want to wait for irrelevant downloads cluttered up by irrelevant pretty pictures and fancy designs.  The simpler the format, the better.

When they are up against deadlines, journalists don’t want to wade through red tape to reach someone in the media relations area of your corporate website. They don’t want to register their details in order to read a media release; they just want to scan a release quickly to see if it contains anything worth using. And they don’t want to be forced to email questions to generic email addresses such as ‘corporate.communications@nokia.com’ when they need a fast response. Often there is no telephone number given, either.

Image, right: Nokia Phones media relations contact information.

Dates. Websites also need to take the universal nature of the web into account. For instance, it is customary in the United States to write a date in the sequence of month, day and year. However, in many other countries it is customary to write the day, month and year. This may seem trivial, but some journalists’ have ignored certain media releases because they assumed the information contained was out of date. As an example, 3/10/2021 is 7 months different from 10/3/2021.

If journalists can’t find what they are looking for on your website, they are likely to reduce or eliminate information about your organization in their article. The ability to find information on the site will also affect their impression of the site and therefore their attitude towards your organization.

Research by web usability expert, Jakob Nielsen, found that journalists who participated in a usability study could only find 60% of basic information on the corporate websites of internationally known companies! Among other tasks, the journalists tried to find basic information about each company’s financial statements, management, commitment to social responsibility and PR telephone number. These were professional journalists, skilled at finding information and skilled at using the web.

Another alarming way to look at the result is to consider that 40% of the information couldn’t be found. It should be a crime for any PR department to leave 40% of media inquiries unanswered!

What’s worse, the journalists in the test could find a PR telephone number only 55% of the time. Although a website can answer many basic questions for journalists, they still invariably want to talk to a live person as well.

Ways to improve website usability for journalists

1. Conduct an audit of your website to see how easy it is to navigate.
2. Check your website PR information, especially your online newsroom if you have one, to determine how well it supports journalists’ tasks.
3. Consider conducting your own usability testing. Ask reporters who cover your industry to visit your site to find standard information.

The effectiveness of your online media relations activities may be measured by the number of visits to your newsroom and by the number of journalists who have given their email addresses to you for receiving news releases and other information.

In addition…

You may also be interested to read my article, “7 ways to use your website as a PR tool,” which also discusses ways in which you can make it easy for journalists to find information in your website.

Image: Nowness ‘About Us’ page.