Okay, so you’ve updated your website so it’s mobile responsive, and you’re keeping people on your site better using that handy little target tag. Why are people still bouncing? Why are people still spending only a few seconds on your site?
It might be a content problem.
Your website is a virtual storefront for your business. When people land on your website, they are presented with who you are and what you are all about. Customers choose to spend their money with businesses that resonate with their identities and their needs. Your website needs to represent who you are and what you can offer your customers, but it also needs to speak to the needs and wants of your customer.
When your customers can see themselves in your website content, they can see how your business can help them with their problem.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself when you’re creating content on your site:
Is my web content relevant to my customer?
When you’re the expert of your industry, it’s easy to make assumptions about what your customer knows (or needs to know). Using industry terminology feels like you are establishing authority, but to your customer, it can feel off-putting, pretentious, and inaccessible. You want to help your customer understand who you are and what you can do to meet their needs; if they want to become a molecular biologist or astronaut, they can enroll in a master’s program to learn those words.
Is my web content easy to read?
When it comes to reading content on the web, formatting matters. Customers almost always scan the content of a site to catch the major takeaways.
Good content calls out what is most important by taking advantage of formatting. Here are a few tricks you can use to ease the way your customers read your site:
Header Tags
Your website probably comes equipped with preset styles. These sets of font sizes and styles assign importance to text on your screen. It’s also something search engines use to figure out how relevant your site is to keyword searches, so use those tags, friend!
Bullet Lists
Ooh, a list! We love lists! Lists mean:
- quick and easy to digest information
- white space wrapped around it for emphasis
- indentation to break up the way the page is laid out
Make things into lists, and people are bound to read ‘em. See? You’re reading this right now, and it has a LIST.
Columns
The Greeks and Romans knew what they were doing when they started using columns. There’s something about how we’re wired that likes it when things are balanced, symmetrical, staggered, or just plain pretty. When you use columns on your site, you break up your content into bite-sized pieces that make your wall of content far less intimidating.
Images
Let’s face it, folks. Even the writer on staff at Spire gets tired of reading paragraphs of content. I love me a well-placed photograph or icon. It’s totally true – a picture is worth a thousand words, especially on a website, where if you placed just 1,000 words, you’d lose your visitors after the first nanosecond. We are an inherently lazy species of web navigators, and we’re only going to get lazier, so lean on images that communicate the mood or tone of your content.
There’s so much more I could tell you about content (I haven’t even mentioned video!), but we’re approaching the danger zone on the number of words you’ll tolerate reading in your average blog post. I’ll leave you with a few additional content resources.
Additional Content Resources
If this content stuff rings true to you and you’re hungry for more, my colleague, Andrew, wrote up a great resource on copywriting and SEO (search engine optimization) that you should definitely check out. Another colleague of mine, Whitney, recently shared some tips for how you can get way better engagement on your site with well-chosen photos. And if you aren’t sure about video engagement, here’s one from the archives: How Video Increases Engagement Online.
“But I’m not a writer, or a photographer, or a web designer! I don’t have time for all of this!”
We do! We live for this stuff. If you’re ready to spice up your web content and keep people from leaving your site before they’ve done what you brought them there to do, let us know.
We can help you start up a new website, write new pages of content for you, or help you choose just a few key pages from your existing site to revamp. Let us do the heavy lifting on your website so you can be out doing what you do best for your small business success.