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Is Your Website In Sync With How Consumers Read Online?
There’s something I noticed on some specialty food websites that I thought might be interesting to talk about.
It’s the use of long, academic articles (often written by a passionate business owner) to give some background & history about their products.
For example, the history of fish farming, the introduction of yams into North America, or analysis of French & Spanish olive oils.
I think they have the right idea, on one level. Sometimes consumers want more information—and the more they know, the more likely they are to buy.
The thing is…academic writing is not fluid reading. It typically uses big flowery words, waxes philosophical—and gets stuck in a lot of little details.
In my opinion, this is not in sync with someone who is in buying mode. The person getting ready to buy is looking for quick, to-the-point information.
Whereas academic articles are written to make people think. Hard. By nature they are slow, dense reading…sometimes a reader has to reread a point several times to process it.
Then there’s the issue of how people read information online.
It’s been well documented that screen brightness & vertical scrolling do a number on our attention spans.
In fact, people are more likely to print out longer articles so they can read them more carefully.
Ask yourself this…is someone who is trying to decide whether to buy or not going to interrupt their focus to print out an article?
Which begs the larger question: Are lengthy, complex articles a good marketing tool?
And…do you want to waste precious real estate on content that‘s not designed to sell your food?
The solution to all of this is easy. Yet, often overlooked.
It’s this: Write about yams, or fish farms, or whatever in lively language. Keep sentences short. Opt for 1- or 2-syllable words—and keep paragraphs to 5 lines apiece tops.
If you have any doubts about what I’m saying, I encourage you to test this out for yourself. I use an online tool called Clicktale to study how visitors to my site read my copy. Clicktale uses video to capture a visitor’s movement on a web page. There’s a free version that allows you to look at 100 visitors per week. That’s enough to give you a clue.
Go check it out, I find it very useful.
If you have your own observations about how visitors browse your site, please share. I’m always looking to learn something new.
Suzanne Ryan
The Gourmet Copywriter
It’s the use of long, academic articles (often written by a passionate business owner) to give some background & history about their products.
For example, the history of fish farming, the introduction of yams into North America, or analysis of French & Spanish olive oils.
I think they have the right idea, on one level. Sometimes consumers want more information—and the more they know, the more likely they are to buy.
The thing is…academic writing is not fluid reading. It typically uses big flowery words, waxes philosophical—and gets stuck in a lot of little details.
In my opinion, this is not in sync with someone who is in buying mode. The person getting ready to buy is looking for quick, to-the-point information.
Whereas academic articles are written to make people think. Hard. By nature they are slow, dense reading…sometimes a reader has to reread a point several times to process it.
Then there’s the issue of how people read information online.
It’s been well documented that screen brightness & vertical scrolling do a number on our attention spans.
In fact, people are more likely to print out longer articles so they can read them more carefully.
Ask yourself this…is someone who is trying to decide whether to buy or not going to interrupt their focus to print out an article?
Which begs the larger question: Are lengthy, complex articles a good marketing tool?
And…do you want to waste precious real estate on content that‘s not designed to sell your food?
The solution to all of this is easy. Yet, often overlooked.
It’s this: Write about yams, or fish farms, or whatever in lively language. Keep sentences short. Opt for 1- or 2-syllable words—and keep paragraphs to 5 lines apiece tops.
If you have any doubts about what I’m saying, I encourage you to test this out for yourself. I use an online tool called Clicktale to study how visitors to my site read my copy. Clicktale uses video to capture a visitor’s movement on a web page. There’s a free version that allows you to look at 100 visitors per week. That’s enough to give you a clue.
Go check it out, I find it very useful.
If you have your own observations about how visitors browse your site, please share. I’m always looking to learn something new.
Suzanne Ryan
The Gourmet Copywriter
Tags: content, entrepreneurs, food, marketing, website
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