CONTENT WRITING
7 Content Formatting Tips for Improving Readability and Human Scanning
Most people won’t even be reading the content on your website and still make a perception about you. In this blog, you’ll learn how to increase readability and improve human scanning of content on your website.
You can spend a lot on content creation, have the best content available on the internet and even have the best solution there is for the problem you’re trying to solve but if your website would look like this.
There is very little chance that this type of website structure will help you succeed.
In a study done by the NNgroup, even a very highly motivated customer will only go through approximately 28% of the content written on your landing page.
People usually google their problem, click on the first few links they see, skim through the content till they find a bolded headed line or your UVP and then start reading.
In an era of busy readers, people have developed a tendency of skimming and scanning through your website content to find quick solutions. So, how can we write our content and format our content when all of us are just a bunch of scanners?
The solution is the “Dual Readership Path” Technique.
Dual Readership Path Technique?
So, you may ask, what is the dual readership path technique?
It is the process of formatting or writing your content for two types of readers:-
- The Scanner — They are the group of busy readers who won’t be going through most of your content. This group consists mostly of your visitors.
- The Analytical Reader — The rare group of people who would read the entire content you’ve published on your website. If you find some people like this, please never let these people go. Stick to them like parasites. Haha! Not literally
How to write or format your existing content making it more scannable for the Dual Readership Path?
After going through some content online and researching some awesome content on pages like copyblogger.com, CXL Insititute. I have come up with 7 Design Factors that will dramatically influence your copy effectiveness:-
- The position of each piece of copy on your website
The position plays a vital role because of just pure eye-tracking tendencies that we tend to have on specific devices.
As shown, this is a classic F pattern that we tend to have in sort of Western societies, I guess, where we read from left to right. We have an underlying tendency when we’re looking at those screens, to start reading from the upper left-hand quadrant and then scanning across. We also tend to move up to down while reading anything.
2. The size of each piece of copy on your website
Fitts Law explains this very well. It is kind of a cognitive law that describes how humans tend to perceive things. The bigger and closer an object is to us, the more accessible it is.
This also explains why your CTA and buttons should be more prominent as then it becomes easier to engage with them.
3.The order of each piece of your content matters
You may be wondering why does the order matter and how is it different from the size of the copy?
This is because of what is called a visual hierarchy.
The order should always match the visual hierarchy of your page.
If you have a copy that a designer goes and takes and then treats or applies their sense of visual hierarchy to that text, in a way that doesn’t jibe with the order in which you’re supposed to read that copy, it’s not going to make sense to your reader.
Your reader will understand your product’s story entirely out of order, or they will miss parts completely because the visual emphasis does not match the sort of narrative attention that you’re trying to convey with your words.
You cannot put a product testimonial in the place of a headline or subheading because it won’t make sense.
4. Create Bulleted Lists
- Like subheads and text breaks, even the bulleted lists can be used to break the substantial texts.
- They make your content stand out from the standard text and provide a visual break for your reader.
Secret Tip: Generally, put all your essential points in bulleted lists so that in the end, people can easily just click a picture and move ahead.
5. Add Relevant and Helpful Links
Use relevant and other helpful links to either your content or content to other writers to provide more information to the users. You can also have a partnership with various influencers who refers their audience back to your homepage to increase the page views.
Be sure and regularly check the links you’re providing on your website. At times people lose their credibility of your site if they are redirected to a spam page.
You should also provide links to any research or chart you have used.
6. The space or noise around each of your copy matters
Hick’s Law explains this very well. This is a funky law that says the more stimulus you put in front of somebody, the harder you’re making it for them to make a decision. It takes longer for people to make a choice, the more options you give them.
And in reality, when people land on your page, you only have a few seconds to guide them in the direction that you want them to go.
Secret Tip: Keep the number of page goals minimal as clutter kills conversions.
7. Keep it short
While we don’t mind reading longer lines in print media, the optimal line length on the web is considered between 40–50 characters. If you make your lines much longer, you might scare your visitors off. Besides, long sentences make it more challenging to focus and to correctly jump from one line to the next.
Takeaway
In this blog piece, we learned that people hardly read your entire content, so we need to make our content more easily visible to them.
We learned that there are two types of visitors, namely, the scanner and the analytical reader and what are the differences between them. In this lazy, eh, busy world, the proportion of the former is usually very high as compared to the latter.
We then discussed 7 tips that would help us increase the readability and improve the scanning of our content.
- The position of each piece of copy on your website.
- The size of each piece of copy on your website
- The order of each part of your content matters
- Create Bulleted Lists
- Add Relevant and Helpful Links
- The space or noise around each of your copy matters
- Keep it short
Let’s connect if you want to know more about such tricks or growth marketing. You can reach out to me at LinkedIn at Shreyansh Goel or email me at shreyanshgoel16@gmail.com.
If you liked this article, please do give my other articles a read-
