How to Improve Website Readership by Re‑Structuring Your Writing

You’ve done a great job at publishing posts on your website’s blog; but there’s something important you didn’t know…  your visitors are only reading a fraction of any given web page.

Yes, it’s true. To truly engage visitors, the structure of a webpage needs to complement the way people read on the Web. Almost all website authors and editors fail to notice this. The following provides guidance for improving webpage readability.

Forget SEO for a Moment… Your Writing Needs To Reach the Reader

Writing for search engine rank is half the battle when creating website prose.  What happens when visitors land on a webpage?  Do they actually read what youv’e published?  If so, do you know how much of it is actually read?

A Mere Fraction of Visitors Will Read an Entire Post

Sure, your website is worth reading in its entirety.  But yet, only 16% of the visitors read a complete web post from top-to-bottom.  The other four-out-of-five read no more than 30% of a webpage before leaving the page.  In other words, 80% of the visitors you toiled to get to your website will read just a sliver of your advice. This 16% web statistic isn’t new.  It was first written about by the Nielson Norman Group in 1997.  And for all the discourse on improving online prose over the last 18 years, this 16% number persists.

An Emerging Content Publishing Model for Audience Engagement

Chances are… you don’t need more traffic. You need your readers to actually read the important stuff you’re publishing.  The fact is, if visitors read the high-quality points you’ve researched and published, they’d be more likely to read further and perform a conversion. But, how is readability improved? Moz recently published a video explaining how calculated word-count and thoughtful deep content positioning can improve average visit time and conversion counts.  Bottom-line, positioning deep content early on a webpage and in the form of pop-outs or drop-downs, will increase readership and conversions.