Your Site Needs Readable Content to Generate Revenue
When potential leads and buyers are visiting your site, they’re looking for information that will help them decide whether or not they should give your brand a chance. If your site’s visitors can’t find the information they’re looking for, they won’t convert.
When search engines like Google scan your site, they use various signals to assess the quality and purpose of your content. If Google can’t find the purpose of your content through your site’s copy, it may lower your site’s ranking and you could lose potential customers.
Website readability measures the ease with which your website’s visitors interact with your content. There are many components to website readability, some of which include:
- Clean typography and visual design
- Easy vocabulary and simple sentence structure
- Clear, understandable copy
You want your site’s visitors (bots included) to immediately understand your brand’s service or product and purpose. You also want your site’s visitors to easily determine the purpose of each webpage. All of this can be done with good web content readability.
Want to improve your website’s readability? Here are 6 tips on how to do it!
Cut to the Chase
No matter how pretty your website’s aesthetics are or how well-written your copy might be, your site’s visitors are on a mission to find the information they’re looking for with the least amount of time and effort possible.
Make sure that the subject of your webpage is extremely apparent in the first few lines of copy. Use text formatting such as headlines, bolds, italics, underlines, highlights, bullet points, indentations, and paragraph spacing to draw the reader’s attention to the most important information on the page.
You can measure how
your content delivers its messaging through online A/B testing tools, or just by experimenting and keeping an eye on your site’s analytics. The longer your visitors stay on your site, the better!
Stick to Simple Vocabulary
When users visit your site, they don’t want to face a piece of literature that they have to deconstruct and analyze. Your content is easily understood when you eliminate jargon and reduce high-level vocabulary whenever possible.
When writing, consider your audience, and write copy that aligns with their cultural and educational background. If you’re unsure about your audience’s background, aim for an 8th grade writing level throughout all of your web copy.
Remember to avoid keyword stuffing! Not only will this make your copy unreadable for human visitors, it could also hurt your SEO ranking!
Take Advantage of Visual Cues
High-quality images and graphics supplement your copy with visual storytelling, and help to guide the reader’s eye towards the information they may be looking for.
Image captions are especially useful in conveying your copy’s messaging to visitors who scan, instead of read, your copy. Image captions get read 300% more than body copy and can increase recall in your audience. When writing image captions, write them as you would headlines, using the appropriate subjects and keywords.
Use Typography to Emphasize Information
As mentioned above, text formatting can draw the reader’s attention to the information they may be looking for. Typography is a holistic way of referring to text formatting, and can include everything from font style to appearance, to structure.
When making use of typography, it’s important not to overdo it. Splitting your copy into paragraphs after every five words is irritating, just as needlessly changing text color or font is annoying.
Overcompensating with typography will make your information look useless and push your readers away. If you’re not familiar with writing web content, do your research! Read articles, landing pages, or just browse through your favorite websites to get a feel of what proper typography and strategic formatting looks like.
Test and Measure Your Site’s Readability
Once your content is completed and your site is live, there are many tools you can use to assess your content’s readability and engagement, such as readability formulas, readability scores, and readability tests. Use analytics, surveys, or reviews to see how well your audience responds to your content.
Hire Iceberg Web Design to Manage Your Content
Crafting high-quality, readable content is integral to generating leads and sales with your website. However, writing readable content that effectively conveys your brand’s messaging can take days, weeks, and even months!
Iceberg Web Design can take web content development off your hands, so that you don’t have to juggle work, life, and writing your site’s copy. We offer content writing, consulting, and blog writing services.
Whether you want to write a whole website or you’re just looking for expert advice on your site’s copy and imagery, call Iceberg Web Design today for a commitment-free conversation about what we can do for your content!
