You’re probably not a professional writer, so you may be excused for not realizing if your website copy isn’t “readable”. After all, it’s in plain English, right? But readability is more than that.AJ Kohn points out the importance of readability on your website:
Readability is about making your content accessible and comfortable. Never make it a chore. If you make your content difficult to read the value of that content goes down. Lack of readability frustrates comprehension and reduces sharing. This, in turn, limits the social echo of your content and lowers the chances of it obtaining organic links.
Here’s your clue: Heed the warning sign of a high bounce rate.
If poor readability is driving away visitors on your website, the clue will be a high bounce rate — the percentage of visitors who leave immediately after arriving on a page without looking at anything else on your site.
If you have a bounce problem, you may have a readability problem.
When readability is compromised, you’re also losing valuable visitors who are all potential customers.
Readability is certainly related to the words you use and your sentence structure; that may determine the reading level or grade of your content. But it’s much more than just that. There are things other than your words that can make your content easy to read or difficult to follow.
Here are some important readability factors to consider
People Don’t Read, They Scan
It’s important to structure your writing to make it easy for people to scan down the page and quickly find the information they need to read carefully. They usually start with developing an understanding of the page layout and navigation and perhaps looking at images.
Noted usability expert Jacob Nielsen conducted a study that found that users “read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.”
Use Font Size Smartly
Headings and subheadings need to be clear. You need a hierarchy of font sizes, and possibly even colors and boldness, to help the reader immediately grasp the structure of your content. I start with a body font size of 16 points in my own blog, and headings & subheadings are clearly larger. Also, think of your headings as representing the structure of your content, much like an outline.
Use Subheadings
Subheadings don’t just visibly demonstrate the structure of your content. They also improve your readability by making your content less dense and, as a result, less intimidating.
Use a Legible Font
Getting fancy with your fonts can easily become counterproductive.
Avoid infatuation with artistic fonts. Make sure your body text and headings are all legible. Some fonts become difficult to read in bold, and research has shown that some fonts that are easy to read on paper are not as easy to read on a computer screen.
My preference is for serif fonts for printing and sans serif fonts for web content. Simple is better; I recommend fonts like Arial, Humanist, and Century Gothic. I typically use the same font family for headings. But since headings are larger you may be able to take more leeway there. Here are some font suggestions to consider.
Pay Attention to Line Height
If the lines of text on your screen are too close together, that reduces your readability. A good rule of thumb is to use a line height of about 1.5, but that can vary depending on your choice of font. The goal is to avoid your text looking cramped or looking too spread out.
Watch Your Color Contrast
An actual example of poor readability because of insufficient color contrast.
Be cognizant of your text color in comparison to the background color. Inadequate contrast can have a dramatic impact on readability and eye fatigue.
I like black text on a white background, and absolutely hate the popular fashion of using gray text instead of black. Colored backgrounds are fine, but pay attention to the color of the text to make sure it’s easily readable.
Use Highlights
Don’t be afraid to italicize or bold important words or phrases – or even whole sentences – so that your most important content stands out. If you’re particularly brave, you might decide to use color or highlighting so the importance stuff jumps off the page.
Shorten Your Paragraphs
Nothing is worse than a paragraph that rambles on and on and on. You may be familiar with the expression TL;DR. That stands for Too Long; Didn’t Read. That almost always means the content is too dense and paragraphs are too long. Three or four sentences is about as long as you might want your paragraphs to be.
And don’t be afraid of one-sentence paragraphs either.
Just like a long paragraph, a long sentence compromises readability. If the user has to parse the sentence grammatically to understand it, it’s too long. The Yoast SEO plug-in for WordPress discourages too many sentences that are more than about 20 words. I agree. A couple of long sentences spread across the entire page or blog post are okay, but too many of them can drive people away.
Use Pronouns With Care
Be careful with pronouns in your content.
In a conversation, it’s easy to know what pronouns are referring to. If I talk about that here, the “that” obviously relates to using pronouns. That’s the antecedent. But if the antecedent is in a previous paragraph, and the person scanning through your content alights on the current paragraph, they’ve missed the antecedent. It’s not obvious what the word “that” is referring to.
Repeating nouns instead of referring to them with pronouns may have an added benefit in that nouns are more valuable to the search engines understanding your content than pronouns are. Just try to avoid being “over-redundant”with those nouns.
Preserve Some White Space
Your content – and your readers – need a little space to breathe. Inadequate white space on the page is one of those things that triggers the TL:DR response. Headings and subheadings, bullet lists, and images all help to increase white space on your page.
Avoid Distractions
In general, you want your visitor to read and absorb your content. You may want them to take action, like download something or buy something, or contact you. Don’t break the flow of your user’s concentration on your content. Distractions are a conversion-killer.
Sliders with rotating images, colorful banner ads, and pop-ups that obliterate some of your content are almost always counterproductive. Be particularly careful about pop-ups. Google refers to those as “intrusive interstitials” and they can damage your page experience. That’s important because page experience is a new and increasingly important part of Google’s ranking algorithm.
Images Can Help Readability
Images can may your content less intimidating and more approachable.
Always use at least one image on every page. I like to insert images with text wrapping around them. They serve many purposes — they can:
Effectively illustrate a point you’re making.
Draw the eye to a particular spot on your page.
Make your page more memorable.
Add a little white space around the image, and white space makes content less intimidating.
Make a long paragraph appear less dense.
Add color to a mostly black-and-white page.
Make your page more approachable which translates into better readability.
Maintain Paragraph Transitions
You don’t want staccato content. Your material needs to flow, to maintain the focus of your reader and ensure comprehension. So try to ensure a natural for progression from paragraph to paragraph by using transition words like ‘and”, “so”, “because”, and even “thus” or “therefore”.
When you maintain that flow, you retain the reader’s attention.
Pay Attention to Your Reading Level
There are a few ways to judge the reading difficulty of your content:
How many sentences in the paragraph?
What’s the average number of words in a sentence?
How many syllables in a word (on average)?
There are a number of tests to determine your reading level. Perhaps the most widely known is the Flesch-Kincaid readability test. That test calculates a reading grade level, calibrated for US readers. The Yoast SEO plug-in for WordPress evaluates reading level using the Flesch reading ease score.
You can get a reading level score online at a few places:
Keep your keyword phrases in mind, but whatever you do, avoid keyword stuffing in a misguided attempt to get better rankings in Google. Not only is it a readability nightmare, it’s also a red flag to Google that can hurt your visibility rather than help it.
Results
The goal of improving your readability is not just to get your point across. You also want to encourage the reader to do something.
Perhaps you want your reader to subscribe to your newsletter. Maybe you want them to call your office to ask questions or request a consultation. Or perhaps you want them to buy a product.
The goal of your carefully constructed readable content is to entice the reader to move down the sales funnel and take the action you want.
Make sure you include appropriate and compelling calls to action on your page for your reader to take the action you want them to.
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Sales conversions are vital to the survival of any business. Thanks to the array of digital marketing tools available, e-commerce businesses can easily advertise their products and services online to customers internationally with a few clicks of a button.
Have a Good, Well-Designed Website That’s Easy for Customers to Use
Customers will have to visit your company website and look through your product pages to make orders online. The website must be written in simple language that’s easy for customers to understand (translated into foreign languages if you are selling products or services online internationally). The pages must be easy to navigate, and the homepage needs to be particularly engaging, so customers stay on your website.
A vital metric that affects the number of sales on your website is the bounce rate. A good bounce rate across the pages on your company website increases the likelihood of online customers sticking around and deciding to purchase your products or services.
Develop a Strong Presence Across Social Media Channels
Engaging, interesting social media channels are a great digital marketing strategy that can attract customers and increase your conversion rate. You can also use social media to get an idea of customer opinion on your company by looking at customer feedback and engagements on comments, the results of social media surveys such as Twitter polls, likes, shares and re-posts.
Your social media channels should directly link back to your company website. In general, digital marketing and advertising products and services online is indispensable for e-commerce businesses in 2022.
Apply SEO Best Practices To Your Site
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a key part of managing any website, and this is particularly true for e-commerce companies. That’s because your whole business revolves around your ability to reach your target market, and the best way to do that is by being at the top of relevant searches.
SEO encompasses a range of different strategies and practices, including improving your social media presence and website usability. It also includes identifying relevant keywords and phrases, including them in well-written content, earning high-quality, relevant backlinks on authority websites and more. Explore a range of ways to optimize your e-commerce site for SEO to find the best strategy for your organization.
Have a Responsive Customer Support Team
Having a fast-responding customer support team in place is another way e-commerce companies can facilitate online sales. Companies may need to have employees who work night shifts to provide customer support through things like online live customer webchats, social media, telephone services, and so on 24/7.
An e-commerce business will not be able to grow its customer base, make lots of online sales, and thrive if it fails to listen properly to its customers. For example, are your customers consistently telling you across online platforms and in conversations with your support staff that your company website is confusing and difficult to navigate? In that case, you should take in this feedback and look into ways you can resolve these issues with your website.
Set Goals and Assess Performance Regularly
Your e-commerce business must have goals, and these can include sales goals, customer satisfaction goals, marketing campaign goals and so on. To measure your company’s success, you should regularly review your performance against these goals. Consistently increasing your sales over time is a crucial indicator that your e-commerce business is healthy and should be able to survive and prosper.
Unfortunately, all businesses have to be aware that unexpected things can happen which may have a considerable impact on business and sales rates, such as pandemics, recessions, and a rise in unemployment levels. Assess employee performance quarterly (every three months) or even monthly. Annual employee reviews are a bit of a thing of the past as they lag behind events and involve looking over things that happened a long time ago.
About the Author
Drawing on her experience collaborating with small businesses and helping them to use content to boost their rankings, Grace Murphy writes informative articles about SEO and digital marketing. Her work is designed with small business leaders in mind, so her audience can make the most of her expertise.
Before exploring citation management, let’s see how it fits in to showing up on Google.
Where you show up in local search when someone searches locally for what you do or sell is a function of three main factors:
Your overall SEO
Proximity to the searcher
Prominence
Much of the rest of my web site deals with overall SEO factors. And of course you have no control over where anyone is when they search. But prominence is something you can control by managing your online citations.
What are citations?
A citation is an online listing of your business on a platform like directories that publishes information on businesses and often online reviews. Here’s an example of a citation on Yelp, showing basic contact information plus other valuable material like business hours, reviews, images, and a call to action.
Our own online citation on Yelp
The value of citations for establishing and growing your prominence is clearly explained by Google:
Prominence is also based on information that Google has about a business from across the web, like links, articles, and directories.
They tracked the results of maintaining listings on just the “big 4” platforms (Google, Apple, Facebook and Bing) compared to managing citations on these sources plus 10 or more directories. You can download the full white paper at the above link, but here are a few of the answers that question.
Improved visibility
Visibility as a function of increased number of citations
In this chart, Direct Search represents people who searched for a business by its name or address. Indirect Search represents searches for a product or service rather than for a specific business. Maps View represents searches on Google’s maps. And Search View represents the number of times a listing was encountered in the normal Google search.
A 91% increase in search views is certainly worth paying attention to.
Improved conversions
The impact of more citations on conversions
In this chart, were looking at not just the number of people who see a listing, but how many take an action moving them closer to buying. Clicking to initiate a phone call to a business didn’t increase by very much, only 13%. But clicking over to the company’s website to learn more nearly doubled. And clicking for directions to get to your business even more than doubled.
Small business visibility as a function of the number of online citations
This chart represents an attempt to identify the “sweet spot” in terms of how many local citations are best to have. I think it fails by not including more than 40 citations. That’s because we don’t know if the increase in visibility would improve even more with additional citations beyond 40. But certainly getting into the 31-40 range adds significant value compared to having fewer citations.
Why do you need citation management?
Isn’t it just enough to go out and get yourself listed in the top citation platforms?
Maybe not.
The folks at BrightLocal found that 85% of consumers found incorrect or incomplete information on business listings this year. Perhaps the worst example of that is that more than 80% went to a business only to find that it was closed despite their online citations indicating it was open. A full 63% said that incorrect listing information would prevent them from doing business with a store.
Online citations can change without your knowledge. Information about your business can change and you may neglect to reflect that in your citations. So is it enough to set up your citations and not worry about them moving forward? I don’t hink so.
Fair disclosure: I offer citation management services to small businesses, so it would be self-serving for me to insist that you need to hire someone (like, maybe, me) to do that for you. So instead, here’s how Moz answered that question.
How do your citations look?
With that said, if you’d like to check the status of your own online citations, there’s an easy way to do that right here. Just run a scan from the button below, enter your NAP data (name, address, phone) and see where you’re listed, where you’re not, and where your listings may be inconsistent.
Citation management is an important part of the local SEO services we offer to small businesses. There are several reasons every small business needs to pay attention to this.
7 benefits of good citation management
Broad Exposure
How widely are you known across the Internet?
You need to make sure you’re listed and easy to find across the web at dozens of local search engines, directories, maps, mobile apps, and voice assistants like Alexa. This also helps Google, Yahoo & Bing to have more trust in who you are, what you do, and where you are.
Accuracy and Consistency
It can make sure your NAP (name address, phone) is consistent across all of those listings. Before working with us, a recent client was missing from more than a third of the top citation listings. Even worse, two listings had an incorrect address and 14 had their old company name. When this happens, Google has very low confidence in who or where you are. And that’s devastating to your chances of showing up in local searches.
Visible Reviews
Having reviews on multiple sites builds your reputation.
Having review stars show up in multiple places enhances your reputation. When you get a word-of-mouth referral, odds are that person will look you up by name before they call, just to check you out. When they do, your website should show up — but so will many of your citations, at places like Google My Business, Yelp, MerchantCircle, Facebook, and more. Some may show up that you’ve never heard of, like Clutch or TrustPilot. If all of those have review stars displaying in the search results, that increases the likelihood that person will want to do business with you.
Review Monitoring
We send our clients an email every time someone posts a new review for them. Responding to reviews promptly has been found to increase conversions and closed business. So it’s important to know about new reviews as they happen.
Suppressing duplicate listings helps search engines trust which is correct.
Duplicate Listing Monitoring
Duplicate and near-duplicate listings can confuse search engines, and that’s never a good thing. We alert our clients whenever we find a possible duplicate so they can check it out and suppress it if necessary.
Robust Business Information
Good citation management doesn’t just start with getting your NAP widely disseminated. All of those citation sources gather and reflect lots of information about your business:
Google is getting better and better at responding to what’s called vertical search. Proper citation management will promulgate information that can help you show up when people search for specific things like
Wheelchair accessible dentist near me
Local restaurant with lasagna
Woman-led wellness coach
Veteran-led SEO company
etc.
Structured data markup focuses Google on your essential information.
A Bonus
An added bonus to our citation management here at Rank Magic is schema code. That’s structured data markup in accordance with schema.org and it’s very helpful in terms of ranking highly in Google, Yahoo & Bing. We collect and maintain a lot of information about your business for your citations. That allows us to provide a simple script to add structured code to your website with a simple copy & paste.
How good is your citation management?
It’s easy to check! Just run a free scan to see whether your show up in about five dozen places across the web. And where you do show up, the scan will show your NAP and highlight any errors or inconsistencies. It will either give you peace of mind or demonstrate how badly you need citation management.
Here are some of the more common ways your business listings can hurt you.
You’re missing
If someone is looking for what you do or sell in a search engine, directory, map, or mobile app and you’re not there – clearly they can’t find you.
You’re a local business and your address is wrong
Nothing is more frustrating for customers than showing up at a business and finding that it’s not there.
Your phone number is wrong
Equally frustrating is when there’s a wrong phone number in your listing and customers can’t get through to place an order or ask a question.
Your listing got changed
You may have carefully corrected your online listing only to find that it’s since changed and now is incorrect. Listings can be changed without your knowledge or approval and those changes can sometimes hurt.
Your business hours are listed incorrectly
You don’t want someone showing up at your business or calling you only to find that you’re not open when the listings said you were. If your hours are changed due to the pandemic or holidays — or for any other reason — you need to make sure they’re listed properly across all of your listings.
Vigilance!
You need to pay at least a modicum of attention to this, reviewing your business listings occasionally.
There are citation management products like Yext PowerListings that can solve a number of these problems, including blocking your listings so that you’re the only one who can change them. These products typically come with a monthly fee but are often worth it by saving you manually managing all of your listings on an ongoing basis.
Business listing management products don’t typically cover niche directories, though. There are a number of different directories for attorneys, for example, or for people in the building trades, and typically you need to manage those manually.
COVID
As long as the pandemic continues, some customers will be looking for reassurance that you have appropriate pandemic protocols in place.
BrightLocal found that 74% of consumers searched for a business listing to see what COVID-19 measures were in place. Make sure you identify that in any of your business listings that allow it.
The most important of these places is Google My Business.
Log into your Google My Business dashboard.
In the left-hand column, scroll down to the section headed From the business. In this section you can add attributes of your business in five categories: from the business, accessibility, amenities, health & safety, and service options.
The first section is where you can identify whether your company is black-owned, Latino-owned, veteran-led, or women-led. Be sure to check of any that apply.
And in the following section on Amenities you can indicate whether you have a gender-neutral restroom.
Health and safety is where you can indicate what COVID-related protocols are in place. This is particularly important right now as many customers are sensitive to possible exposure and if you haven’t updated your Google My Business information since before the pandemic, these were not available the last time you were here.
The last section is Service options where you can indicate whether you offer on-site services and/or online appointments.
In the next section, accessibility, you can indicate whether your premises are wheelchair friendly.
If you just want to update your COVID protocols, you can do that right in the Home section of your Google My Business dashboard:
Help Your Customers
A good rule of thumb is to always make it easy for customers to buy from you. You need to also make it easy for them to learn what they need to know about you to help them get to the point of buying. Make sure you’re listed widely and consistently across the web, but perhaps most important is thoroughly and accurately.
Your experience and perspective is valuable. Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
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