How to write for the web
The two most important words to keep in mind when writing anything online are: short and scannable.
Contrary to popular belief among editors, web readers are not lazy. In fact, most web users engage with multiple long-form posts each day and digest large volumes of content. However, information on a screen is slightly more difficult for our brains to absorb.
Despite this, most readers on the web (wrongly) believe that they are able to work through more information at a greater speed than if they were reading on paper.
This is why it’s important for us as editors to understand how people read on the web and structure our content in a way that is most likely to help them get the information they need quickly and effectively.
How people read on the web
A very old study by Nielsen that investigated how people read on the web pronounced, very simply, that “They don’t”.
Back then, Nielsen found that 79% of people on the web scan articles rather than reading them word for word. Only 16% of users read each and every word. We’re not quite sure what happened to the other 5%.
Although Nielsen’s research is nearly 30 years old, their findings haven’t changed much over the course of the internet’s history.
The point is that it’s very rare for people to read online. It’s far more likely that the users who are visiting your website are scanning your content to find the information that they’re looking for. (This is also why well-written metadata is so important for driving traffic.)
There are two main things to keep in mind when trying to understand how users read on screens – and therefore how to structure pages and articles:
- Users follow an ‘information scent’; and
- Scanning patterns are predictable
The information scent
When searching for information, users will enter a website based on what they predict they’re likely to find on a certain page or via a certain path on the site.
In this context, they make a mental trade-off between what they believe they can gain and what they think it will cost them to make that gain.
This means that your content must be valuable and easy to find. If information is useful but difficult to find, the user will leave your page. If it is easy to find but not useful, the result will be the same.
There are two things to consider here: getting users to your page and keeping them there.
Getting users to your page
Writing content that targets a particular keyword and considers the searcher’s intent in relation to that keyword will help users to find your page.
You’ll also want to ensure that the metadata for your page speaks to the user’s keyword and search intent in order to encourage them to click on your link on the search engine results page (SERP).
Keeping users on your page
Average bounce rates on the internet range from 26 to 70%. Looking at those stats, it’s clear that there’s an art to keeping users on websites—and some web editors haven’t mastered it.
If you’ve developed your content to speak to a particular keyword and have kept the likely intent of the searcher in mind when building your page, you already have a pretty solid start here.
From there, it’s essential that you create a sound and logical structure for your content (including headings, lists, internal links, and imagery) that will help to guide the reader to the information they’re looking for on your page.
Scanning patterns
Another important factor when understanding how users read on the web is scanning patterns. There are a few common patterns that people follow when reading web pages:
- F pattern: focus on the left-hand side of the page, paying more attention to the first few lines of each paragraph.
- Layer cake pattern: reading headings and subheadings
- Spotted pattern: skipping through large chunks of information, searching for specific words, numbers, or other items
- Marking pattern: eyes focus on one point as mouse or scroller moves (important on mobile)
- Bypassing pattern: skipping the first word in a line when multiple lines start with the same word
- Commitment pattern: reading all of the text
While it would be ideal for all of our users to follow the commitment pattern (only the most highly motivated and invested readers use this approach), this is unfortunately not the case.
Most readers scan text in the F pattern and use a combination of the other methods to find the information that they’re looking for in our copy. Understanding this, we’re now able to write and format our content to suit web readers.
How to write for web readers
When writing for the web, it’s important to keep in mind that you aren’t only writing for human readers, but also for androids like SEO spiders and web crawlers. As such, it’s important to structure your content to work for both people and search engines.
To take advantage of the most common scanning patterns (the F, layer cake, and spotted), editors can use the following formatting guidelines:
- Include clear and descriptive headings and subheadings
- Keep paragraphs short and use them to group related information
- Put the important points up front—convey information that answers a search query in the first two sentences of the first two paragraphs
- Add internal links to highlight related, helpful information
- Use bulleted lists to make important information stand out
Implementing these five guidelines will ensure that users who land on your website are able to find the information that they need quickly and efficiently, which may encourage them to carry on reading or even return when they have another question in future.
Once you know how people read on the web it becomes far easier to structure your content in a way that increases engagement and moves potential customers towards conversion.
