Tohu Whenua wanted our help to connect with the widest audience possible through their digital content. We created a recommendation report showing how they could optimise content without making huge changes to the website.
Tohu Whenua Tohu Whenua allows people to visit Aotearoa history where it happened. Check out their epic video of Waitaha Canterbury above, which gives a fresh view of the attractions in the region.
People are increasingly finding what they need online through LLMs and social platforms, often bypassing websites completely. We help clients understand where and how people interact with their content, and use performance data to stay visible and relevant.
In a review of their data we found lots of opportunities to connect their beautiful content with more people. Here are some examples.
Identify user priorities
Data revealed top user priorities for the website; we identified which attractions people were most interested in using Google search and page view data. Data allows you to test a new approach on targeted pages before committing to site-wide changes, and we recommended some high-profile pages on which to test changes.
Make the most of their epic videos!
Videos provide a unique view on an attraction which puts the visitor at the centre of the experience. They are still a great way for brands and organisations to be seen – AI can’t summarise videos! They’re appearing more in AI responses, and also Google’s new ‘Video’ tab. We recommended that Tohu Whenua continue to invest in video production, and also provide links between the website, videos and social media to allow people to explore more Tohu Whenua content.
Improve the user journey between DOC and Tohu Whenua
We often recommend content-based SEO strategies to increase website traffic, but in this case we read the room. Data showed that while Tohu Whenua content was appearing high in Google search results, Department of Conservation (DOC) links were usually appearing above them.
Rather than trying to compete with DOC, with their strong brand and government domain, we recommended crafting the user journey between DOC and Tohu Whenua to best serve the user journey. This will help Google and LLMs to better understand their offering, and will also prevent duplicated content littering the web.
With data we can understand user needs, and make sure that our content is differentiated from other sites and fits into the online ecosystem. For government domains this makes total sense, and even commercial sites need to understand competition and differentiate their offerings.
Make the content purpose more obvious
We didn’t have time for in-depth data analysis in this review, so we offered some user experience recommendations. These included making the content and navigation labels more task-oriented, and providing a clear onwards path above the fold from the home page. These recommendations are based on UX trends I see on other websites – call it intuition or inbuilt data goggles – I can see where users are likely to have problems.
Tohu Whenua can hold simple user research to confirm whether to make these changes – they just need to get the website in front of a few people who haven’t seen it before and ask them to complete relevant tasks.
Defining marketing and content strategies can feel daunting with so much change and so many platforms to operate on. We used data to help Tohu Whenua understand user behaviour, and identify the best path forward.