A professional-looking, usable website design is great for creating a good first impression and will keep people from leaving immediately, but it’s high quality content that keeps them around longer and wanting to read more about what your business can do to help them. Your website content needs to be strong in substance as well as presentation to most effectively communicate your message.
These 4 tips describe what you can do to create website content that can be easily consumed by any website visitor:
- Use a genuine voice
- Avoid technical jargon
- Target 8th to 10th Grade reading level
- Use headlines, short paragraphs, and bulleted lists
Use a Genuine Voice
We’ve all been to websites that use faceless content to communicate a message. Corporate websites do it the best. It’s obvious that some marketing manager created the website content without any thought to personality.
Granted, it’s much harder to create personality on a typical large company website when there are several layers of approvals, but it’s easy to do on a small business website when you are the business owner and approver.
Let your own voice shine through and give your content personality! It will make for much more interesting reading by your website visitors and will make it easier for your visitors to get to know you.
Avoid Technical Jargon
Making someone feel dumb is one of the fastest ways to get them not to like you, and an easy way to make many people feel dumb is by using technical words and catch phrases on your website. If your objective is to get people not to like you, then this tactic is worthing trying. However, if you want people to like you, and consequently, buy from you, then make it easy for them to understand your message by saving the technical jargon for meetings with others in your industry.
Target 8th to 10th Grade Reading Level
Most people visiting your website were not English majors. Many did not even go to college. And some do not speak English as their native language. You can still create quality website content that explains what your business does and how you can help without using complicated sentences and complex vocabulary.
A guideline is to write your content for an audience that is at an 8th to 10th grade reading level. Once you’ve created your content, you can run it through a Flesch-Kincaid reading calculator to verify that you’re within the boundaries.
Use Headlines, Short Paragraphs, and Bulleted Lists
Eyetracking studies show that people read websites by scanning headlines and reading down the left side of the page. A pattern appears in the shape of the letter “F” that illustrates how content is consumed.
Help your visitors scan by organizing your content using clear headlines and sub-headlines. It’s easier to capture someone’s attention with a headline, then it is by including the content in a paragraph, but the paragraph is where you can provide additional detail that supports the headline.
Paragraphs should be short and interspersed with lists to break up large blocks of content. In grade school English, we learned that a paragraph requires at least four or five sentences, but this rule does not apply online. Break up your paragraphs based on how your content looks on your site as opposed to using grade school rules. When you mix short paragraphs with lists, you make your website content easy to read and understand.
Follow these tips, and your content will be much more effective in delivering your message to your potential customers.
Next, I’ll explain calls to action, and how to influence your visitors to take the next step to find out more about you.
Previously, I wrote about the importance of planning your website content before writing any pages.
“Honest” image by Sweet One
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