Creating content for the web is surprisingly different from creating content for traditional media. That’s why you need to be careful to avoid these common mistakes when preparing content for online purposes:
Mistake #1: Too Long; Didn’t Read (TLDR)
Some of us (especially those of us of a certain vintage) love to write long, involved paragraphs. Unfortunately, our online readers don’t like reading such content, for several reasons:
- According to the U.K.’s Heriot-Watt University, reading from computer screens is about 25% slower than reading from paper.
- Whenever someone checks out an article online, there are links to a dozen other pieces vying for attention just a click away.
- People don’t “read” everything on a web page. Blame today’s information-saturated environment. They pay more attention to something that interests them, and disregard other contents that (they think) are not useful or interesting.
Mistake #2: Not Designed for Scanning
On paper, you’re encouraged to write reasonably comprehensive paragraphs covering a particular thought or topic. Not so with content designed for consumption by screen.
According to the Footprints blog, web readers hunt and peck. Studies have shown that nearly four out of five web readers don’t read web content word-for-word. Instead, they scan the page, culling information from headlines, section breaks and bullet points.
Online usability expert Jacob Nielsen did an eye-tracking visualizations study which shows that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.
As an online content creator, it’s important to use that insight to your advantage, composing pieces that feature bulleted lists, sub-headings and other web-specific composition strategies designed to catch the eyes of the skim-readers.
Mistake #3: Too Short for Google
Unlike human readers, Google prefers longer articles. Google loves articles and web pages with at least 300 words (and often as many as 2,000 words).
A happy compromise: somewhere between 300 and 800 words, with content broken into short sentences punctuated by relevant images.
Mistake #4: Not Catering for “User Intent”
Google loves content that signals “user intent”.
What is user intent?
Per Entrepreneur Magazine: user intent is the purpose behind people’s search queries; when they click on to Google, their intent is their dominant concern. And the same should be true for your business.
“There’s no such thing as people typing in random queries without a reason for typing in those queries. A searcher must have intent,” says Neil Patel, co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and KISSmetrics.
Mistake #5: Not Incorporating Video
Google and Facebook both love video and will favour content that includes video over most other types of content. It doesn’t have to feature high production values (though it does need to look professional) — and it should be short, no more than a couple of minutes (those pesky consumers and their attention spans again!)
If you’d like to avoid these five and many other common mistakes, check out our Writing for the Web online training course.
Writing for the web requires a whole different approach — and you can either learn that the hard way, by discovering it for yourself, or learn from us.
A couple of years ago, in response to this need, we developed a popular half day workshop to take marketers through the requirements of writing for the web.
Now, in response to demand from New Zealand businesses, we have repurposed that workshop as a full-blown nine-part online training course, complete with content that’s been refreshed and updated to reflect today’s needs.
Check out the Writing for the Web online training course by clicking here.
