Getting your website content right
How much text content do I put on my website?
Have I written too much text on my website?
Have I written too little text on my website?
These are questions I get asked by website owners every single day and is one of the hardest questions to answer as there is a very fine line between too much text and too little text content on a website. I will also discuss on this page how to lay your text out as this is also extremely important.
Many people make the very simple mistake of thinking too much about the search engines when creating their website rather than their potential visitors. By putting too much effort into building a 'search engine friendly' site rather than a 'visitor friendly' site you are more than likely creating a site that the search engines will not be too impressed with and this can do more harm than good.
Have I written too much text on my website?
Have I written too little text on my website?
These are questions I get asked by website owners every single day and is one of the hardest questions to answer as there is a very fine line between too much text and too little text content on a website. I will also discuss on this page how to lay your text out as this is also extremely important.
Many people make the very simple mistake of thinking too much about the search engines when creating their website rather than their potential visitors. By putting too much effort into building a 'search engine friendly' site rather than a 'visitor friendly' site you are more than likely creating a site that the search engines will not be too impressed with and this can do more harm than good.
You want between 5 to 10 main selling points about your business and place them into bullet points. Visitors eyes are always drawn to short and to-the-point statements and these will help them to understand what type of site they have landed on.
To explain the above in more detail as well as other text content advice, I am now going to show you a website I created for a client which will hopefully make things more understandable. Click on this link to open up the example website in a new browser window then you can flick between each site as you read my advice.
We will start from top to bottom of the home page. See how quick you can work out what this site has to offer:
As soon as you open the home page you can see this website is very obviously something to do with dogs. I have made the visitor aware of this with the banner and with the image of the dog at the top fold of the page. The visitor to the site can also see a very clear and easy to use navigation system at the top of the page within the banner. I explain navigation in more detail on my Easy to use and consistent page navigation advice page.
Underneath the banner it quite clearly shows the following information:
So straight away this tells visitors what my client does, where she does it and how to contact her to discuss further. So many people fail to get this into their home pages, I see so many sites where I have to look through each page for 20 minutes before I find out this information!
Following this information we then have a simple 3 lined paragraph giving a little more explanation of the business which is then followed by easy to read bullet points. My client offers a lot of different services and so getting them into bullet points means visitors can see within seconds the type of services she offers. So if you look at the first bullet point it clearly shows that the business owner offers help with dogs pulling on their leads. A visitor from Cambridge who has a dog pulling on his lead will spot this point within seconds and the chance of him calling my client is extremely high. This visitor will probably not even browse the rest of the site, within seconds a call is made and my client gains herself a customer!
Now let's think of a typical person who has a dog, they live in cambridgeshire and they have trouble with their dog pulling on it's lead. What would that person type into Google?
Give it a try yourself, type the above into Google and you will see my client's site around 3rd or 4th position on page one!
You can try this with many of the bullet points and you will get the same results. Let's take another of my client's bullet points:
Type that phrase into Google. My client's site is second on page one.
Now, if you type in 'Dog behaviour specialist Scotland' into Google you won't see my client's website. Why not? Because my client doesn't cover that area and so why would she want to appear page one for this? But type 'Dog behaviour specialist Cambridge' into Google and there she is, page one!
So what does all this tell you? I have got a lot of important information on to the home page without overdoing the amount of text content which does two things. 1) allows the visitor to see within seconds what and where this service is and 2) it allows the search engines to understand exactly what the site is about and give it a high ranking.
So let's recap here:
Not too much text, not too little.. get the important information across in bullet points.
Ensure you let your visitors know what areas you cover, the search engines will also pick up on this.
If your website covers the whole of your country or even the world please don't add every single town and village making your page a mile in length! That will not do you any good at all, just type something like 'we cover the whole of the UK' or 'Nationwide service' something along those lines. But if you cover a smallish area like your town or county then use this to your advantage. Let me explain why...
Type 'Plumber' into Google and you get over ten million results. Now type in 'Plumber in Birmingham' into Google and you get just 280,000 results! So if you are aq plumber in Birmingham why try and compete for a page one result for just 'plumber' when you stand a lot more chance of getting a page one for 'Plumber in Birmingham' just by simply typing at the top of your website 'Plumbing services in Birmingham'
So what do we put into our bullet points? The way I try and think about this is what if I had 10 seconds to tell someone what my business was and why they should buy from me.
Think of yourself as someone looking to buy a house for the first time, you're a bit nervous about buying something so expensive, you don't have a big deposit to put down and you would like to move in quick but aren't really sure if a mortgage is for you? So you go to the search engines and come across a website called 'Happy House Buyer' (click to open in a new widow)
Within seconds you see the bullet points:
This is exactly what you have been looking for! and quite likely you contact this company. That's how simple it really is. Now if that website didn't have those bullet points and all that information was hidden in many long paragraphs you probably wouldn't see it and go to the next website you can find. That's how easy it is to lose a potential client!
If you are a jewllery website and have all items at 50% off RRP or you offer FREE delivery then these are excellent bullet points, people love a bargain.
Appealing Text
How many times have I seen a page with red, pink, purple, green. orange text all on one page, all different fonts, shapes and sizes.... yuk!! Please don't!
Keep your text professional looking, Red is not a good colour to make a point. You can make '50% OFF EVERYTHING' look appealing and noticeable without it being in bright red, try and be a little more constructive in your layout. Don't be fooled into thinking that text that flashes at you, or has glittery effects or follows your mouse will make people like your website as they won't, they will probably shut the site down within seconds. Make sure whatever colour you choose for your text stands out against the background. Would you be happy reading text that looked like this?
Try and limit to what goes onto each page to only imprtant things. Page counters, clocks, flashing banners saying 'welcome' are all unnecessary and tacky and do not give your business that professional look and feel and this will warn people away from you.
How many pages?
Keep the amount of pages to your website to a minimum. A page I often see on websites is an 'about us' page. Now whilst I believe there are some exceptions to this, I believe most sites don't need this page. If you're offering a service for example baby sitting, or pet sitting, something where people are entrustiung you to look after their loved ones then an 'about us' page is a good idea and include a picture of yourself or your team as people will make their decisions based on this a lot of the times. When I was looking for a sitter for my two dogs I saw many frightening looking people who I would not have trusted with them, so if you have a friendly dog-loving face or a picture of you playing with a dog in the park then use it! In this case you can use your 'about us' page to tell people your qualifications and experiences with animals, something that will make the visitor comfortable with using your services. You don't need to go into detail about your shoe size and your husband's hobbies!
If you sell jewellery online, it won't be harmful to have an 'about us' page but very few people will be interested that you have 4 kids, 2 dogs and you love rock climbing, it's really not required.
Have a contact page and offer if possible alternative means of contact such as an address, phone number and a form they can contact you by email. Try to avoid giving your actual email address on your website as you open yourself up to spam. As well as a contact page it is worth seriously considering having at least a phone number clearly disaplyed on every page of your site as my above example showed with the dog behaviour site and the fact that many people could contact you from just what they see on one page. Make it easy for them.
Having too many pages and too much information can infact be offputting to a visitor but if you feel this necessary then do so. A good example would be a website promoting a holiday villa in Cornwall where as well as the villa details you may want a few pages on local attractions, nearest places to eat, drink etc, so in this case a few information pages would be good.
Make sure that however many pages you have it is very simple for the visitor to navigate further on the site or back to a page they previously visited and want to look at again. Read my Easy to use and consistent page navigation advice for further details on this.
Page Load Speed
The length of time it takes for your website pages to load onto your visitor's screens is now a factor into where your site gets placed on the search engines and this must be taken seriously. If your page takes too long to load for your viewers then you could get penalised. Ther are tools on the internet to test your page speed, use these to test how long it takes. If too long then you can speed up your pages using gzip compression.
I have spent over ten years getting page content right so telling you everything I know would just be too much to read. The above pointers though should be enough to get you a good start and a great chance of getting a much higher position on the search engines if you adhere to what I say. I will be adding more helpful information to this site as I think about it so do save this to your favourites and come back often.
Remember, if you find my advice to confusing or if you just don't have the time then I would be happy to give you a free quote to optimising your existing website myself. Please call me on 01608 684796 or email me.
To explain the above in more detail as well as other text content advice, I am now going to show you a website I created for a client which will hopefully make things more understandable. Click on this link to open up the example website in a new browser window then you can flick between each site as you read my advice.
We will start from top to bottom of the home page. See how quick you can work out what this site has to offer:
As soon as you open the home page you can see this website is very obviously something to do with dogs. I have made the visitor aware of this with the banner and with the image of the dog at the top fold of the page. The visitor to the site can also see a very clear and easy to use navigation system at the top of the page within the banner. I explain navigation in more detail on my Easy to use and consistent page navigation advice page.
Underneath the banner it quite clearly shows the following information:
So straight away this tells visitors what my client does, where she does it and how to contact her to discuss further. So many people fail to get this into their home pages, I see so many sites where I have to look through each page for 20 minutes before I find out this information!
Following this information we then have a simple 3 lined paragraph giving a little more explanation of the business which is then followed by easy to read bullet points. My client offers a lot of different services and so getting them into bullet points means visitors can see within seconds the type of services she offers. So if you look at the first bullet point it clearly shows that the business owner offers help with dogs pulling on their leads. A visitor from Cambridge who has a dog pulling on his lead will spot this point within seconds and the chance of him calling my client is extremely high. This visitor will probably not even browse the rest of the site, within seconds a call is made and my client gains herself a customer!
Now let's think of a typical person who has a dog, they live in cambridgeshire and they have trouble with their dog pulling on it's lead. What would that person type into Google?
Give it a try yourself, type the above into Google and you will see my client's site around 3rd or 4th position on page one!
You can try this with many of the bullet points and you will get the same results. Let's take another of my client's bullet points:
Type that phrase into Google. My client's site is second on page one.
Now, if you type in 'Dog behaviour specialist Scotland' into Google you won't see my client's website. Why not? Because my client doesn't cover that area and so why would she want to appear page one for this? But type 'Dog behaviour specialist Cambridge' into Google and there she is, page one!
So what does all this tell you? I have got a lot of important information on to the home page without overdoing the amount of text content which does two things. 1) allows the visitor to see within seconds what and where this service is and 2) it allows the search engines to understand exactly what the site is about and give it a high ranking.
So let's recap here:
Not too much text, not too little.. get the important information across in bullet points.
Ensure you let your visitors know what areas you cover, the search engines will also pick up on this.
If your website covers the whole of your country or even the world please don't add every single town and village making your page a mile in length! That will not do you any good at all, just type something like 'we cover the whole of the UK' or 'Nationwide service' something along those lines. But if you cover a smallish area like your town or county then use this to your advantage. Let me explain why...
Type 'Plumber' into Google and you get over ten million results. Now type in 'Plumber in Birmingham' into Google and you get just 280,000 results! So if you are aq plumber in Birmingham why try and compete for a page one result for just 'plumber' when you stand a lot more chance of getting a page one for 'Plumber in Birmingham' just by simply typing at the top of your website 'Plumbing services in Birmingham'
So what do we put into our bullet points? The way I try and think about this is what if I had 10 seconds to tell someone what my business was and why they should buy from me.
Think of yourself as someone looking to buy a house for the first time, you're a bit nervous about buying something so expensive, you don't have a big deposit to put down and you would like to move in quick but aren't really sure if a mortgage is for you? So you go to the search engines and come across a website called 'Happy House Buyer' (click to open in a new widow)
Within seconds you see the bullet points:
This is exactly what you have been looking for! and quite likely you contact this company. That's how simple it really is. Now if that website didn't have those bullet points and all that information was hidden in many long paragraphs you probably wouldn't see it and go to the next website you can find. That's how easy it is to lose a potential client!
If you are a jewllery website and have all items at 50% off RRP or you offer FREE delivery then these are excellent bullet points, people love a bargain.
Appealing Text
How many times have I seen a page with red, pink, purple, green. orange text all on one page, all different fonts, shapes and sizes.... yuk!! Please don't!
Keep your text professional looking, Red is not a good colour to make a point. You can make '50% OFF EVERYTHING' look appealing and noticeable without it being in bright red, try and be a little more constructive in your layout. Don't be fooled into thinking that text that flashes at you, or has glittery effects or follows your mouse will make people like your website as they won't, they will probably shut the site down within seconds. Make sure whatever colour you choose for your text stands out against the background. Would you be happy reading text that looked like this?
Try and limit to what goes onto each page to only imprtant things. Page counters, clocks, flashing banners saying 'welcome' are all unnecessary and tacky and do not give your business that professional look and feel and this will warn people away from you.
How many pages?
Keep the amount of pages to your website to a minimum. A page I often see on websites is an 'about us' page. Now whilst I believe there are some exceptions to this, I believe most sites don't need this page. If you're offering a service for example baby sitting, or pet sitting, something where people are entrustiung you to look after their loved ones then an 'about us' page is a good idea and include a picture of yourself or your team as people will make their decisions based on this a lot of the times. When I was looking for a sitter for my two dogs I saw many frightening looking people who I would not have trusted with them, so if you have a friendly dog-loving face or a picture of you playing with a dog in the park then use it! In this case you can use your 'about us' page to tell people your qualifications and experiences with animals, something that will make the visitor comfortable with using your services. You don't need to go into detail about your shoe size and your husband's hobbies!
If you sell jewellery online, it won't be harmful to have an 'about us' page but very few people will be interested that you have 4 kids, 2 dogs and you love rock climbing, it's really not required.
Have a contact page and offer if possible alternative means of contact such as an address, phone number and a form they can contact you by email. Try to avoid giving your actual email address on your website as you open yourself up to spam. As well as a contact page it is worth seriously considering having at least a phone number clearly disaplyed on every page of your site as my above example showed with the dog behaviour site and the fact that many people could contact you from just what they see on one page. Make it easy for them.
Having too many pages and too much information can infact be offputting to a visitor but if you feel this necessary then do so. A good example would be a website promoting a holiday villa in Cornwall where as well as the villa details you may want a few pages on local attractions, nearest places to eat, drink etc, so in this case a few information pages would be good.
Make sure that however many pages you have it is very simple for the visitor to navigate further on the site or back to a page they previously visited and want to look at again. Read my Easy to use and consistent page navigation advice for further details on this.
Page Load Speed
The length of time it takes for your website pages to load onto your visitor's screens is now a factor into where your site gets placed on the search engines and this must be taken seriously. If your page takes too long to load for your viewers then you could get penalised. Ther are tools on the internet to test your page speed, use these to test how long it takes. If too long then you can speed up your pages using gzip compression.
I have spent over ten years getting page content right so telling you everything I know would just be too much to read. The above pointers though should be enough to get you a good start and a great chance of getting a much higher position on the search engines if you adhere to what I say. I will be adding more helpful information to this site as I think about it so do save this to your favourites and come back often.
Remember, if you find my advice to confusing or if you just don't have the time then I would be happy to give you a free quote to optimising your existing website myself. Please call me on 01608 684796 or email me.
Many of today's search engines will rate your site on how 'visitor friendly' it is. This can include things like well written text, a nicely laid out website, a website with an easy to use navigation system as well as the website's uniqueness.
Whenever I create a website I put myself into the mindframe of the visitor for every aspect of the build. Sometimes this could even mean taking on the role of a typical visitor to the website I am creating at that particular time. In my line of work I create many wedding related websites and as a majority of the potential visitors to those websites will be female I even find myself thinking as a female despite being a male myself! But this is what you have to do if you really want to impress your visitors and in turn the search engines.
Most visitors don't spend a lot of time on each website and a poorly presented home page can make the difference of your visitors staying on your website and visiting internal pages and hopefully becoming a customer or closing the site down withing 3 seconds.
Think of your home page as your shop window. You would want your best products in the window to entice people into the shop as well as ensuring they understood just from what's in the window to what kind of shop you are right? The same goes for your home page of your website; you need to let your visitors notice within a few seconds, what you do, what you offer that your competitor doesn't?, how available are your products or services? and how they go about enquiring further into buying these goods or services, and all within the home page.
Now this doesn't mean we have to make a page 2 foot long to get all of this on, there are much simpler ways that you can get a lot of information across to the visitor with just the right amount of content.
Bullet Points
Bullet points are one of the best ways to get a lot of detail across quickly to your site visitors and where possible you should use these. It's common knowledged that very few people will sit down and read paragraph after paragraph of text content on most websites, especially if you are selling goods or a service. Ok so I know this page has tons of text content but then this is ok because this is an information website and if like yourself you have got this far then it's quite likely you are serious about making your website work for you and are genuinely interested in what I have to say, but as a rule of thumb most website work in the opposite way and your visitors will be put off with as much text as this.
Whenever I create a website I put myself into the mindframe of the visitor for every aspect of the build. Sometimes this could even mean taking on the role of a typical visitor to the website I am creating at that particular time. In my line of work I create many wedding related websites and as a majority of the potential visitors to those websites will be female I even find myself thinking as a female despite being a male myself! But this is what you have to do if you really want to impress your visitors and in turn the search engines.
Most visitors don't spend a lot of time on each website and a poorly presented home page can make the difference of your visitors staying on your website and visiting internal pages and hopefully becoming a customer or closing the site down withing 3 seconds.
Think of your home page as your shop window. You would want your best products in the window to entice people into the shop as well as ensuring they understood just from what's in the window to what kind of shop you are right? The same goes for your home page of your website; you need to let your visitors notice within a few seconds, what you do, what you offer that your competitor doesn't?, how available are your products or services? and how they go about enquiring further into buying these goods or services, and all within the home page.
Now this doesn't mean we have to make a page 2 foot long to get all of this on, there are much simpler ways that you can get a lot of information across to the visitor with just the right amount of content.
Bullet Points
Bullet points are one of the best ways to get a lot of detail across quickly to your site visitors and where possible you should use these. It's common knowledged that very few people will sit down and read paragraph after paragraph of text content on most websites, especially if you are selling goods or a service. Ok so I know this page has tons of text content but then this is ok because this is an information website and if like yourself you have got this far then it's quite likely you are serious about making your website work for you and are genuinely interested in what I have to say, but as a rule of thumb most website work in the opposite way and your visitors will be put off with as much text as this.
