I’m sure we all know that websites have minimal time to capture our attention; if they don’t have what we want (or we can’t clearly see that the website has what we want) we want to move on to the next website quickly. Personally, when I am looking to purchase a product or service I open the top 3-5 pages on the search engine and skim read. If I can’t find what I’m looking for quickly I am closing the page and I’m onto the next website page I have opened within seconds.
There is research that states many people leave a site within 3-5seconds if they cannot find what they’re looking for – that’s a very short time slot to try and capture a potential customer before they go off to your competitor and buy from them instead!
Here are some great ways in which you can format your content to try and get those visitors to stay on your website page a little bit longer and then hopefully be your new customers;
Bullet Points
Bullet Points or Bulleted Lists are a great way for the reader to skim read your content, they can stop at the bullet points they want to read and go back to ones they may have missed if they feel your content is worth their time.
Numbered Lists
Articles that have ‘7 ways to….’ need to be turned into numbered lists, you can have each paragraph numbered so the reader knows how far they are through the content. This works well if it is a more lengthily article.
Headlines or Sub-Headlines
Breaking up an article with headlines or sub-headlines breaks up an article easily, allowing a reader to skim through for the bits they are looking for. Headlines or Sub-Headlines work well in case studies or articles that cover different topics with one page.
Bolding Words
Marking words in bold is a really good way of showing the keyword or marking important words / parts of a sentence that will be of interest to the reader of your website content. You need to make sure that only a small amount of the content is in bold though – not all of it or the bold content will no longer stand out.
Following these top tips when it comes to formatting your website content should really help your website pages stand out from the competition. If you need help creating or formatting your website content let us know – happy to help where we can!
