Optimizing Your Content for Easy Reading
Daniel McGuigan, 13 Jul 2008
Posted under News & Articles » Managing Your Website
Copy is one of the most crucial elements of any web site. And while most discussions of Web copy focus on creating great copy, it’s also important to ensure your copy is formatted for quick and easy understanding.
Great copy that comes in dense blocks of text often never gets the chance to convert visitors because it never gets read.
Most Web pages - as well as the copy on those pages - are skimmed and scanned before they’re read. Web visitors want to find information relevant to them before digging in. So making a few easy formatting changes can yield some huge conversion improvements by allowing visitors to easily orient themselves to your content.
Amazon did this earlier this year. Here are a few other strategies and steps to optimize your pages for skimming and scanning.
- Bullets
Listing out items in bulleted lists makes it much easier for a visitor to get useful information. Bulleted lists work great for emphasizing multiple benefits, as each benefit gets sufficient space to stand out and all of the benefits can be quickly scanned by visitors wondering if a given product or service will satisfy their needs.
- Bolding
Within paragraphs of copy, it’s a good idea to bold the more critical text. Visitors’ eyes will be able to quickly latch onto those important, bolded points amidst the rest of the text. That said, use bolding sparingly as too much will simply overwhelm visitors and actually hurt your visitors’ ability to skim and scan your text.
- Hyperlinks
Hyperlinks’ contrasting colour and underlining also grab the eye and cause hyperlinked words to pop out at visitors. But since links are clickable, those hyperlinked words and phrases can also be used to qualify visitors and move them to pages and messaging crafted to speak to and answer more specific needs and questions - stuff that may not interest everyone but that will be important to specific segments of your audience.
- Sub-headlines
Break your content up into sections and label those sections with Sub-headlines (also called subheads). Once you’ve done that, try reading just the subheads and see if you come away with the gist of page’s content. Not only will this help visitors quickly scan the page for content, but it will also allow them to skip down to the section that’s most important to them. And as an added bonus, Sub-headlines help create needed whitespace for your page layout.
- White Space
White space makes it easier for visitors to find information and focus on what they are really looking for. Ensure you leave white space by breaking up long paragraphs (consider more than 5 stacked lines to be too long), using sub-headlines and bullets, and by maintaining decent margins and line spacing. Web copy should never look intimidating or too densely packed.
- Technical Jargon
Using highly technical words or industry jargon inhibits skimming and scanning for anyone who isn’t 100% familiar with the terminology. As a general rule, copy on a broad-audience website should be at or below a fifth grade reading level. If specific technical terms are necessary, say if they are a key search term, link them to a glossary or FAQ, or explain the terms within the text itself.
These are a just a few simple changes that can dramatically improve your Web visitors’ ability to skim and scan your text, and find the information important to them. Not only does this make visitors happier, it makes them more confident in purchasing from you. As a reminder, you should test almost any changes you make on your site, but this is a great area to get started on and can bring back some really good results.
Editor’s Note: In fact, one of Dan’s clients increased his conversion by 24% by reformatting their page for skimming and scanning.
Article Source: GrokDotCom.com: copy writing tips.
|
