Most people don’t read more than a quarter of the words on a webpage
A sad fact of copy writing is that most visitors read very few of the words you spend so much effort writing. The reason for this is that the average person reads about 250 words per minute and spends 30-40 seconds on a page that interests them. If there are 500 words on that page allowing a few seconds for looking at images means they will only read about a quarter of the words.
With this in mind it is important to make sure the words they read are the ones you want them to. There’s a few ways you can do this:
- Titles and subtitles
Breaking up the page into sections make it easier to find areas of interest. - Bullets, bold and italics
Important words and ideas can be flagged up. - Short paragraphs
Three or four line paragraphs can be easily read but large blocks of text are daunting and often avoided. - Internal links
Links to internal product and service pages in a different colour draw the eye and are more likely to be clicked on.
Readability
When the goal of a website is to generate enquiries and help sell products and services it is important to steer clear of writing that is too technical. Instead choose easily understood terms and save the technical language for discussions with clients that have the knowledge level to understand it.
Reading age
There are various online tools that will calculate the reading level of your text such as: www.readability-score.com. Most base there results on the American school system but the target is to write for someone with a US Grade 8 reading level which is about 14-15 years old.
