Question – Am I asking my site visitors to churn through too much text?
There are two key considerations that need to be balanced when finalising the textual content on your webpage. The first is to provide appropriate information for your site visitor and the second is to ensure that the search engines are kept happy. Here’s a tip to satisfy your site visitors.
TIP – be brutal with your content and reduce the words by 50%. Take a look at what online news sites do. They show an attention-grabbing headline and succinct explanation of the topic.
Generally, people arrive on your page with a specific goal in mind. They may be there to find information or purchase a product/service. Either way, they will make very quick decisions about whether to proceed based on the information you provide. People ‘scan’ content so presenting them with lines and lines of text will make this difficult.
Using the preceding paragraph as an example, I’ll show how to sharpen up text content. The paragraph consists of 57 words – 344 characters – 5 lines:
Paragraph re-written with 50% target in mind:
Website visitors are goal-oriented. They crave information or purchase opportunities and make fast decisions so make it quick and easy. They ‘scan’ text so limit to essential information. (28 words – 216 characters – 3 lines).
Give it a try on your current content and ask me for help if you need it.
