Website content is typically used to educate your visitors and tell them about your brand. If expertly written, this content can easily convert visitors into customers. However, the thing is that most people in the world are not that keen on reading things that are difficult to fathom. By difficulty, we mean stuff like difficult words and long-winded sentences, as well as style and formatting issues. Anything that can become an impediment to comprehension is counted towards reading difficulty. Today, we are going to teach you some easy methods for ensuring that your website content is attractive and readable.
Tips for Making Your Content More Attractive and Readable
These tips are by no means an exhaustive list, but they are pretty good. Acting on them will help your content become attractive and readable.
1. Format It for Scanning (Lists and headings)
The first thing that poses a problem for reading and attractiveness is the website design. A bad design will not be attractive. Even if the content itself is highly valuable if the design is bad, most people won’t bother to read it. So, invest in good website design. Make sure that the text is easy to discern and contrasts against the background. As for readability, you need to format the text to make it appear short and palatable. You can do that by:
- Making liberal use of headings and subheadings
- Using bullet points and lists where they are applicable
Headings help readers quickly skim through the content to see whether it is useful to them or not. If they do find something that is useful, then chances are they will stay to read the entire if not most of the content. This is much better than them bouncing because they couldn’t be bothered to read the entire thing because of a lack of formatting. Lists serve a similar purpose. They provide substantial information in an easy-to-understand way. Lists are also eye-catching, so they can attract the attention of skimmers and entice them into actually reading the content.
2. Use Simple Vocabulary Used in Daily Life
What kind of people use websites? Mostly normal people do. These people want content fed to them. They don’t want to open a thesaurus or a dictionary in the midst of their reading session to find out the meaning of a word/phrase. That is a detractor from their required experience and will result in a higher bounce rate.
To mitigate that you need to use vocabulary that is used in daily life. Those are the words and phrases that people are most familiar with and have little to no trouble understanding. Of course, this does not apply to highly technical and specific topics. Such topics require an inherent understanding of the subject matter and above-average language skills. But if you are not writing such content then it is in your best interest to keep the language simple and easy to understand.
You can do that with the help of paraphrasing. You will have to proofread your content and check it for such issues. Once they are found, you can use a paraphrasing tool to replace all difficult words with their simpler synonyms. That way you will have little to no readability issues.
3. Use Short Sentences and Paragraphs
Short sentences and paragraphs are your friend when you want to create readable content. They are also reasonably attractive. They give the impression that the content is not that difficult and segmented into neat little sections. Long sentences are hard to keep track of. Readers have trouble keeping the context in mind when they have to deal with multiple subjects, objects, and verbs in one sentence. This is especially a problem with sentences that have multiple clauses.
What you should do is limit your sentences to a single clause each and don’t say more than you need to. This will keep the readers’ confusion down to a minimum. Paraphrasing tools can help you here as well. Some tools have modes that can alter sentence structures and make the sentences shorter.
The same goes for paragraphs. A single paragraph should deal with only one subtopic of the overarching discussion. As a general rule of thumb, you should keep your paragraphs limited to only three lines. Try not to exceed four lines and add white space between different paragraphs to differentiate them. This looks visually attractive and improves readability.
4. Use Active Voice instead of Passive Voice
Active voice is the sentence structure in which the subject is the focus, and the object is the afterthought. In the passive voice, this is in reverse; the object is the focus and not the subject.
Active Voice:
Subject Verb Object
The cat ate the meal.
Passive Voice:
Object Verb Subject
The meal was eaten by the cat.
Hopefully, that example illustrated the differences between the two voices. So, why active voice instead of passive? That’s because active voice is more straightforward and to the point. Sentences written in active voice are also shorter and, therefore, easier to understand. So, your website content will become easier to read if it’s in active voice.
5. Use Different Colors and Add Pictures Where Suitable
Colors and illustrations go a long way in making your website content look more attractive. Pictures stand out against text, and they catch the website visitor’s eye instantly. Obviously, if you want people to read your content, then you have to attract them first and images are great at that.
Now, the key is to add pictures that are related to the content and serve as an alternate method of providing the same information. Graphs and charts are great at providing statistical data in a palatable form.
As for colors, you can use contrast to bring attention to specific parts of your text. For example, bright text on a dark background is super eye-catching. Using such visual devices to your advantage is the key to attracting the attention of your audience.
Conclusion
And that’s it for this blog post. We have taught you five simple ways in which you can improve the attractiveness and readability of your website content. If you can apply them effectively, you will be guaranteed to see a rise in your website engagement metrics.
