The Only People Who Read On The Internet Are Search Engines
Robots Read Everything, Your Visitors Don't
Well this is not entirely true. But if you run an ecommerce or business website, generally people don’t read all your on page text.
The point here is that most internet users do not read every word on a webpage. They scan the page and look for words and calls to action. Most importantly, all your attempts to heavily market to them will generally fail and they will ignore those marketing messages. Sometimes it can even drive them away.
Generally, your visitors are on your website because they are looking for something, or they are trying to solve a problem. Your goal should not necessarily be to overload them with tons of textual information, but to help solve their problems or help them quickly find what they are looking for.
Now the opposite holds true for the non-human visitors. Who are these non-human visitors? The Search Engines! All they want is text. And tons of it! They love it so much, that the more you provide them with unique text, they end up rewarding you with more visitors. 🙂
So where do you draw the line?
It depends on where your website is at in terms of traffic. If you are suffering from not enough traffic, then increase your on page text. Try to make your on page literature as valuable to readers as possible. Don’t just fill up the page with repeated keywords and meaningless text.
WARNING: In some cases you don’t want to provide all your answers in your website copy. Sometimes you want your visitors to have questions. In these cases, generally you want a sales person to take over and speak to them about solving their problems. In this case have a call to action like: Call Now To Find Out More. Or have a chat option available.
Now if you already have enough traffic, then you are golden. The next step is to monetize the traffic. This is the situation where you may reduce the amount of text on your page, and optimize your pages to convert more visitors into actual customer or qualified leads.
A lot of people think that there are some golden internet rules to converting visitors into more business. Some of these myths are bigger buttons, stronger calls to actions, listing bulleted benefits etc. The most important notion to take away from this post is: These myths may work in some cases, but not all. The only way to increase conversions is to test different elements on your page.
Typical On Page Elements To Test:
And of course the list goes on and on…
Conversion testing is very analytical and it takes a lot of patience. But the rewards are phenomenal. If you think your website can greatly improve from conversion optimization, contact us and we’ll make it happen. 🙂