We all have busy lives. Your customers are balancing work, family and home. To make life easier for them, a website should be both easy to navigate and easy to read.
Afterall, if your website is cluttered with unnecessary words, consumers will get turned off and simply stop reading.
Whether you are writing content for your website or your blog, there are some key tactics to incorporate when writing for the web.
Keep It Simple
Remember the days when you had a write essays for school? As a window film dealer, your website is not a place for long essays and reports.
The Crazy Egg blog says the first 15 seconds spent on a page is critical to keep people staying longer. That’s not a long time. People are quickly scanning your website for information that pertains to them and their interest at that moment. And today, most of your website visitors are on their mobile phones.
Because of this, your content needs to be brief and to-the-point. Write in a conversational tone and vary your sentence lengths to assist with easy-to-read content.
For your webpages, we recommend keep your blocks of text to no more than 100 to 200 words.
If you are writing a blog, keep your sections no longer than 100 to 300 words – which brings us to the next point. Use headlines.
Headlines Help
As it relates to blog writing, break up your content in small bites or sections and separate those sections with smaller headlines, or “subheads”. For instance, this blog’s headlines include: “Keep It Simple”, “Headlines Help”, “Use Bullets (or Graphics)” and “Brevity is King.”
Your headlines within the copy should reflect your main idea. This allows the user to quickly skim your main points fast. If they see something that they want to read more about, then they can stop and read more. But if they don’t, they still get the idea of what you are trying to convey just by reading your headline.
The use of headlines within a blog works great. For writing content on the webpage, headlines provide the same opportunity. Short blocks of text beneath an attractive subject line (or headline) is a common design practice.
Use Bullets (or Graphics)
We know that you have a lot of facts to say about window film – especially the different 3M™ Window Film products and all the benefits that they provide.
However, avoid the urge to write long blocks of text. Sometimes, facts can get buried within a paragraph and get skimmed over by the human eye.
Instead, use bullet points to relay facts. The human eye can easily scan bullet points.
A graphic can also be used instead of a bullet point. According to Smashing Magazine, icons are a great way to keep people’s attention, make a page more dynamic and break up content to make it easier to read.
For example, this photograph shows how a graphic element can bring attention to a specific fact:
Provide Links
Make those first 15 seconds on a page count by providing them plenty of jumping off points to learn more.
Google likes links for SEO purposes (which improves your chances of being found in a search). However, be aware of how your links work.
- Make sure that your hyperlinks open in another window. This keeps your users on your website, so they can easily go back.
- Make sure that your hyperlinks work properly – especially if you are linking to a site that is different than your own (i.e. 3M’s residential window film landing page).
- Test the link when you first build the page. But make note to test it again in another three months to make sure that content hasn’t changed.
- Be certain that your hyperlinks are relevant to your topic.
Brevity is King
Edit. And then edit again. Cut unnecessary words that bog copy down.
Make sure your tone is friendly. Imagine that you are standing at a fence post and talking to your neighbor. This will help you to write in a more conversational tone.
Also, avoid jargon and industry trending words that aren’t understood by the general public. (For example, people know what paint protection film is but they don’t know what PPF means.)
Have questions? Accent Distributing provides its dealers marketing assistance. To speak to a marketing expert, contact Accent Distributing’s Inside Sales team at (941) 922-5268 or email [email protected].
Other Resources
Don’t just take our word for it. The University of Maryland provided a website to content writers that are working on pages for its website. Many of the same tips – and more – are listed on this resource.
There are several books on the market related to website writing.
We recommend “Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works” by Janice (Ginny) Redish. We also recommend Roy Peter Clark’s “How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times.” Both of these are great resources for anyone building their own content for their website or writing their own blog.
