The game of internet marketing is largely influenced by the quality of the content your company can produce. They say “content is king” for a reason; all the AdWords money in the world won’t help you if it leads users to a cluttered, confusing page rife with spelling errors and lacking a noticeable call-to-action.
But quality content isn’t enough without quality design. Readers only scan internet content, and if yours doesn’t translate well to this reading style, your company’s internet marketing campaign could be in trouble!
In this post, we share 3 content marketing tips that will improve your content’s “scanability” and conversion rate. Read on to learn some of the ways we handle your company’s content optimization.
- Chunking content. Readers generally don’t respond well to dense walls of text. For maximum impact, try parceling or “chunking” your content into more digestible bites. These smaller, distinct pieces of information can be scanned and memorized much easier than the huge manuscripts some business owners type up in their blogs.
Compare the ease at which you can memorize the following two series of numbers:
1. 14166197935
2. 1-(416)-619-7935
There’s a reason we don’t give our phone number out as shown in example 1. The span of our immediate memory is short, which forces us to organize input into successive “chunks.” Treat your website copy like a phone number, and when in doubt, add some breathing room to your content.
If your carpet company blog is offering 100 cleaning tips, try to chunk and organize them using subheadings listing 5-9 at a time. You’ll keep readers more engaged, which means more time on the page and a greater chance of conversion.
- Make word recognition easy. Some writers or industry insiders weigh their content down with flashy words and jargon. It’s usually done to make content more impressive, but oftens renders it incomprehensible.
Don’t alienate everyone outside of the linguistic nerds in your audience. At best, you will slow your readers down. At worst, you’ll jettison them off the page entirely. The Flesch reading score will be helpful here because it forces you to dumb down the vocabulary for a strong grading.
While we’re on the topic of word recognition and clarity, try to avoid ambiguity with your word choices. Ambiguous words are everywhere. “Address” could refer to a physical location or the action of speaking. “Web” can be something a spider spins, the skin between your toes, or something to do with internet marketing.
If you’re forced into a corner and surrounded by ambiguous words, give the reader context clues.
- Make legibility your number-one priority. Internet marketing through content isn’t just about the words on the page: it has a lot to do with the page itself. Architects use a principle of universal design to guide their creations, and you should too. In other words, readers are comfortable with information laid out a certain way, and complying with this universally-enjoyed design will keep eyes on your content. This has to do with the way you place and write headings, bullet points, images, tags, captions, and links.
For more information on page design with optimal legibility, please get in touch with a member of our internet marketing team at (416)-619-7935.