Guest Article by Billy Attar
Professional blogging is an integral part of many businesses' marketing agendas. Successful blogs can bring visitors to your site, spark interest in your products, and attract a larger fan base. However, as seen with many of our own Clicktale clients, getting good readership to your blog is often not a reflection of the quality or quantity of content you are creating, it is a function of the way the blog is presented.
By using website heatmaps generated by an In-Page Analytics tool, such as Clicktale, you can easily evaluate your visitors' engagement with your content and improve the effectiveness of your blog design. Mouse Move and Mouse Click Heatmaps reveal where on the page your visitors move, hover, and click their mouse. Attention Heatmaps can tell you how long they spend on each section of your content. Scroll-Reach Heatmaps show you how far down the page visitors are willing to scroll.
- Use Mouse Move Heatmaps to see how visitors are interacting with your content.
If after evaluating your website Heatmaps, you find that your visitors are not interacting with your blog as expected, do not be discouraged, as even minor fixes can have a major impact on your readership!
Write Headlines That Spark Curiosity
Give them an eye catching title they can't resist. There are over 133,000,000 blogs in existence, so your visitors most likely have other blogs to read. Encourage your visitors to click on titles to open. Ask questions and promise answers that your readers genuinely want or need to know. Use a larger font or a different style to clearly separate your header from other text on the page. Make it easy for visitors to find the content that is interesting to them. It just might be a sub-title further down on the page that grabs a reader's attention and gets them reading from that point onwards.
- These are good examples of clear titles and content presentation from WebDesign Tuts+ and Smashing Magazine.
Zoom in on Best Content
As we have found from our own website heatmaps, most visitors usually scan text, not spending more than 30 seconds to one minute on a page. In fact, the shorter the paragraph, the longer attention time visitors seem to give. Therefore, ensure a quick and easy read. Bold important phrases or keywords that will help your visitors ZOOM IN on relevant content.
Going that Extra Scroll
Freedom of speech! Express yourself! Don't feel the need to limit your content. Just give your visitors a reason to go that extra scroll. Create separate sections of paragraphs to gain focus on specific content. Additionally, use alternative formats to get information across quickly and easily. And this can be done in multiple ways.
- Encourage your visitors to go that extra scroll, read further, learn more.
Love your lists/bullets: People enjoy bullets for easy access to information.
- Organize and clarify data
- Summarize long-winded paragraphs
- Number step processes
Tables: If your tables are well proportioned, they are a good way to communicate a lot of data in an organized manner and small amount of space.
Images and infographics: Use images and/or infographics to separate content. You can also add one continuous vertical element to your webpages, such as a vertical line or shadowing that indicates continuing page content.
- Infographics express visually pleasing data to your readers quickly and easily.
Captions: Good captions describing images get a lot of attention. This is a good way to communicate main points of your content, in addition to the image itself.
And So It Ends!
Did you know that many of your visitors scroll down to read the last paragraph of your blog post first and then scroll back up to the beginning? Blogs can be a creative and effective medium to get your ideas across to a mass audience of people. Just remember to craft your content. Make it both aesthetically pleasing and data rich to keep visitors coming back for more. You spend time and energy writing your blogs with the help of website heatmaps generated by In-Page Analytics tools, you can make sure they are being read and appreciated as you intended them to be.
Learn more about heatmaps in this blog post.
About the Author
Billy is a UX and UI consultant at Clicktale working with some of the internet's largest websites. His clients have ranged from small business and non-profits to Fortune 500 companies. Billy is a New York University graduate with advanced degrees from NYU and Texas A&M.