How to Improve Your Blog’s Readability and Reel in More Readers and Engagements
If you have been in the Digital Marketing industry in the past decade, you already have heard of the old adage—content is king. That remains to be true until today. Google still relies on content to sift and index through millions of web pages every day. Many businesses rely on blogging and Social Media to spread the word and promote themselves all over the Internet.
Content is one thing, but engaging readers is a different thing altogether. You may be churning out new blogs and posts every day or every week, but the real question is, is it being read? Are people being engaged?
The content might be king, but readability lords over it. People’s attention span online is very short. They can click and open multiple tabs, watch tons of videos, chat, and stream media all at one time. Your followers might open and read through your post, but they may not even finish it half-way! In fact, in some research, most people online would just read less than 28% of a blog post.
Furthermore, millions of content are published daily. How can your own post compete with that? Especially against media and corporate giants who already have a captive audience. One of the ways to capture followers and readers to your page is to improve readability.
Creating quality content is already a given, but readability is another thing—especially online. Fortunately, many studies are already done to help us improve content readability. Want to know the secret? Just read on!
1. People scan websites in an F-pattern.
In an eye-tracking study by Dr. Jakob Nielsen, a guru of web page visibility notes that most people read websites in an F-shaped pattern. This means most readers are just going to read long sentences in the first few paragraphs of your content. That’s why many blogs come up with numbered or bulleted lists!
2. Narrow columns are much preferred.
Let’s face it, who likes to follow a long line of text online? No one would definitely bother with that. Narrow columns are much pleasing to the eye and it improves the overall readability of your blog posts. Experts agree that a 600-800 pixel width is already good enough for desktop content. Fortunately, many premade templates already cover this kind of format, so if you are using one, you are pretty much covered.
3. Spice up with images, of course!
Who likes to view one block of text, right? Well-placed images help break the monotony of texts in your article, and it is also a great informative material too. Studies suggest that half-width images are better in improving readability, and it helps readers scan the post more easily.
4. Organize your content with subheadings.
Remember the F-pattern? Listings can help with that, and of course, you need to separate and organize your content with the appropriate headings and subheadings. This helps your reader scan your content easier, and it helps them zero in on the aspects that they really need to read on.
5. Be mindful of content length.
Let’s face it, no one has the time to read a thousand-word blog at any given day, right? On the other hand, Google does not look favorably on short articles. So what should be done here? How can you strike a balance?
A 200-word article is not exactly Google-worthy, but a 300 to 500-word article is already good enough. As long as it is complete with information, you don’t really have to go beyond 500 words for daily or weekly posts.
However, veteran bloggers also agree that creating lengthy blogs is still a good rule of thumb to follow. However, you don’t have to do this frequently. You can allot lengthy blogs once a month or so, but it should be more thorough and it should answer your audiences’ most pressing problems.
So are you ready to revamp your blog according to this structure? Make the change now!
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