Why People Really Read Your Small Business Web Site?

Maybe you spent a lot of time designing your website and writing copy for it, or maybe you spent a lot of money and had a professional designer and copywriter do it all. But there are about 4 billion websites on the Internet. That's a lot of competition for your website, so how do you get people to actually read your copy? There have been some interesting studies on reading patterns and website usability. They are referenced at the bottom of this article. Website users typically leave a website that takes more than 7 seconds to load and the average visit duration is just over 1 minute. Assuming your site loads in less than 7 seconds, you have an average of one minute to convince your visitor to stay. And how do you get them to stay? The answer is simple: content, content, content. But it takes an average of 5-7 visits for people to buy your product or service, so how do you keep them coming back? By regularly changing the content. Delete text, add text. Add full pages from time to time and consider splitting long pages into two. According to research, content alone is not enough. There are several factors to consider when creating a quality website. Several studies tell us how to improve any website. How Audiences Read Websites Would it surprise you to know that most website users don't actually read your website? This is what Jakob Nielsen and John Morkes found in a 1997 study. They found that 79% will scan your website and only 16% will read it word for word. Their recommendation is to use scannable text using: • Highlighted words • Meaningful subheadings • Bulleted lists • One idea per paragraph • Inverted pyramid style • Half the number of words compared to conventional writing Let's also see what W3school says. Their article "Web Site Design" confirms that users are more likely to scan than read, and if they don't feel like they've found what they're looking for, they'll leave within seconds. W3school recommends using short sentences and paragraphs and breaking up excess information into different pages. Let's talk about the inverted pyramid style for a moment, because that's probably the only term you might not have heard of. Do you remember the papers you had to write in high school or university? They usually start with an introduction, then move to background information and discussion, then to findings, and finally to a conclusion and recommendations. All of this means that you need to read a lot of information before reaching conclusions and recommendations. Nielsen and Morkes suggest inverting the pyramid. You can write your website as a variation of the inverted pyramid by writing a summary first and adding details after the summary. Most people don't scroll, but writing your site in an inverted pyramid style can convince them to. How Writing Style Affects Readability Nielsen and Morkes measured the effect of different writing styles on five versions of the same website. The control version was a promotional text page, and each of the other four pages used one of the following versions and had the following percentage improvement according to their test readers: • Short version with about half the number of words as the control: 58% • Scannable layout with the same text as the control element but easily scannable: 47% • Objective language using neutral rather than subjective, boastful or exaggerated language: 27% • A combined version using all three: 124% Tracking their eye movements In 2003 and 2004, Eyetrack completed a study called Eyetrack III. Their study was for news-type websites, but what they found will also help us structure our small business websites. The study found that their users followed our Western culture from left to right, first noticing the top left corner of the page, hovering there for a moment, then moving down in a z-shape to explore the rest of the page, and finally scrolling back up to the top right corner . The study found that the eye will stop and read the first few words of a dominant headline first, especially when that headline is in the top left corner and sometimes the top right. Readers will usually stop reading at five headlines regardless of the number used, but an unusual keyword will often make people pause. Curiously, they also found that smaller font encouraged reading while larger font encouraged scanning. Are you trustworthy? Nielsen and Morkes found that website users seek credibility in different ways and suggest that high-quality graphics, good writing, and the use of outbound links increase credibility. The Internet was originally intended for information, and it still is today. Over the years, several people have tried to experiment with website copywriting. They've consistently found that users don't want to see "hard sell" types of copywriting. Nielsen and Morkes also confirmed this theory in their paper. They found that website users want straight facts and that credibility suffers when users feel that claims are exaggerated. An interesting study on website trustworthiness is “How do people rate the trustworthiness of websites?” by B.J. Fogg Ph.D, Cathy Soohoo, David Danielson for Consumer Webwatch. They studied 10 sites in each of 10 categories with nearly 2,700 participants. website rating. They showed the results of 18 comments about credibility. Here are the top 10: • Design Appearance: 46.1% • Information Design/Structure – Organization and Ease of Navigation: 28.5% • Information Focus – Breadth and Depth: 25.1% • Company Theme – Admirable Theme vs Strictly Commercial: 15.5% • Information usefulness: 14.8% • Information accuracy: 14.3% • Name recognition and reputation: 14.1% • Advertising – dislike of pop-ups, positive use of advertising: 13.8% • Information bias – commented positively and negatively: 11.6% • Tone of writing – a straightforward friendly tone increases credibility: 9% What does this all mean to you? Content may be king, but design has a powerful influence on credibility. Your proposal should be professional, organized, consistent and easy to navigate. Pages should load within seven seconds or you could lose visitors, so use a small number of quality, optimized graphics and keep your page content down to two or at most three MS Word pages. Your reader's eye will first stop in the upper left quadrant, so this is a good place for your logo and company name. And the headline in the upper left quadrant is very important to keep the reader on your page for more than a minute, so consider a headline just below the logo. Consider that the first three words of your opening headline are the most important, and clear headlines are better than cute, ambiguous ones. As for the content itself, are you a really good writer? If you are not, you may want to hire a professional to write your website for you. If so, use a concise, scannable and objective writing style to maximize the readability of your website. Focus on p