Hey Siri: Some 50% of searches are voice search these days, according to comScore. So optimize for voice search.

Here’s how:

1. Ask ChatGPT, “What questions are XX asking about YY?”

People tend to pose voice searches as questions: “Siri, what time is sunset today?” Find out what your audience is asking by asking ChatGPT. Or click the Questions tab on a tool like SEMRush.

Then create pages, posts and other pieces with the question as the headline and its answer as the content.

2.Choose long-tail search terms.

Voice searchers don’t ask for simple terms like “LAX flight delays.” Instead, they’re more likely to ask a longer, more conversational, more precise question: “Will Flight 457 on XYZ Airlines be delayed out of LAX?”

Indeed, most searchers use three or more keywords in their searches, according to a study of 10 million U.S. internet users by Experian Hitwise. Consider that when choosing your terms.

3. Explain how to

The number of how-to searches has increased by 70%.

Check the search volume on terms like for “How to [your topic]” and choose the subjects your audience seeks help with. Use “How to [your topic]” for the headline, page title and page description.

4. Use conversational keywords

People write more formally when they’re typing into a search box. But they speak more conversationally when asking Siri to search.

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Most Americans spend at least 8.5 hours a day looking at a screen, whether a TV set, computer monitor or mobile device, according to a study by Ball State University. Frequently, we use two or three of these devices at once.

That multitasking costs. According to a study by Stanford University, heavy multitaskers:

• Are more easily distracted by “irrelevant environmental stimuli”
• Can recall much less of what they’ve just learned
• Are much less able to concentrate on the task at hand

Now, where was I going with this? Oh, yes.

“The net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention,” writes Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

As we “power browse” a dozen web pages at once, check our email 30 or 40 times an hour and text while driving, we become “distracted from distraction by distraction.”

So don’t count on your web visitors being all there when they show up on your web page.

“Psychological research long ago proved what most of us know from experience: frequent interruptions scatter our thoughts, weaken our memory, and make us tense and anxious,” Carr writes. “The more complex the train of thought we’re involved in, the greater the impairment the distractions cause.”

Links limit learning.

One study at Utah State University tested that theory. Mechanical and manufacturing engineering students studied machining lessons via:

• Linear web pages, where students clicked to move to the next page, like turning the pages in a book
• Linked web pages, where students navigated links on a page to decide which page to visit next

The results?

• Linear learning was faster. Students using the linear lessons finished their studies in half the time that students using the linked module required.
• Linked learning was less effective. Students using the module with links missed 33% more questions on a test than those using the linear web pages. Even simple linking was enough to reduce student scores by two grade points.
• Average learners struggled more with links. A-level students performed equally well with either module. But B- and C-level students fared much worse with the linked pages than with the linear module.

Why? A printed page communicates its argument line by line. That delivers a more coherent view of the world than do short chunks of hyperlinked text.

Plus, navigating links may divert mental energy that people might otherwise spend understanding complex information.

Screen reading cuts comprehension.

When 1 million North Carolina middle-school students received computers and internet access from 2000 to 2005, their math and reading scores declined, found Duke University economists Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd.

The reason: They were distracted by the web. (Hey, given the choice between spending the afternoon solving fraction problems or spending it on DumbWaysToDie, I’d go for the website, too!)

The web’s interactive nature also makes the medium harder to understand. After all, it’s not easy to focus on the text when you’re also clicking and navigating.

When participants in one study read Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover” in hypertext, for instance, three-quarters had trouble following the story, according to researchers David S. Miall and Teresa Dobson. Just one in 10 who read linear text struggled to understand the story.

The reason? The web readers’ attention, Miall and Dobson said, “was directed toward the machinery of the hypertext and its functions rather than to the experience offered by the story.”

More so on mobile

These problems are multiplied when people read on mobile devices. Mobile web visitors pay less attention to your message, spend less time on it, read more slowly, understand less, remember less and are less likely to act on your call to action.

The communicator’s bottom line?

This is just one more reminder that humans — adults as well as kids — get distracted when reading your messages online.

The solution? get to the point faster, organize better, make it easier to read and more skimmable.

____

Sources: Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, W. W. Norton & Company, 2010

Christine Hailey, “Hypermedia, multimedia and reader cognition: an empirical study,” Technical Communication, Aug. 1, 1998

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This just in: “Readers” actually don’t do much reading.

Indeed, just 19% of participants in a Harris Interactive poll read articles word-by-word. Many more skim mostly headlines (34%) or the full article (25%).

That means 67% skim, and 81% don’t read, online news.

Why?

People don’t have time to read online news thoroughly. Instead, they’re more likely to be skimming a text for specific information like a phone number or selectively reading to reduce the amount of time they spend with your information. Whichever “reading” technique or “reading” method they use, they are actually not reading much at all.

Beyond news

It’s not just news. People skim and scan text in other online channels and devices, as well:

• How people read on the web: They don’t; so make webpages scannable
• Do people skim, scan, read emails? Just 19% of email newsletters get read thoroughly
• People are skimming text on tablets: Insights from Poynter’s EyeTrack study
• People skim through the text of blog posts: They read 3.5% of the words on the page
• Eye tracking online shows where people look: Change how people see your page with 6 eye gaze patterns

Reel in your readers

So how do you catch these skimmers and scanners? According to the Harris poll:

• Hook them with your headline. A catchy headline (54%) tops the list of elements that convince skimmers to read.
• Wow them beyond words. Interesting pictures (44%) and compelling infographics (28%) are also strong lures.
• Draw them in with data. Interesting data or research that supports the article, which drew 43% of respondents to read, was the only content element that made the list.

Bottom line: Draw skimmers and scanners in with display copy and images. Don’t expect to reach them with paragraphs.

___

Source: “TV is America’s Preferred News Mode Overall, but Online is Matching or Outpacing it in Some Segments,” Harris Interactive

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Readers are busy. Fluff takes space. Space takes time. So let’s cut the fluff and get on with it.

To cut the fluff, aim for a fact-to-fluff ratio of at least 1:1.

How do you find your ratio?

Pass the yellow highlighter/red pen test.

Try this test:

1. Highlight all your abstract claims, ideas and concepts with a yellow highlighter.
2. Underline all your concrete evidence — fun facts, juicy details, examples, anecdotes, case studies, statistics and so forth — with a red pen.

What should your copy look like? At least as much red as yellow.

Remember what Texans say about people who are “all hat, no cattle.” Too many pieces of corporate web pages are just that — puffy, overblown chest pounding with little solid evidence to back up the claims.
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What does most corporate web copy look like? A sea of yellow broken only by the occasional speck of red.

To improve your ratio:

1. Increase fact. Add “proof” in the form of hard evidence — statistics, analogies, facts, examples, stories, testimonials — to all your claims.
2. Reduce fluff. Cut hyperbole, adjectives, adverbs and other puffy prose. Strip your copy of “marketingese.”

Here’s how:

1. Increase fact.

What convinces people to do business with your website? According to research by the Nielsen Norman Group, it’s facts, not fluff:

1. Level of detail: 41%
2. Layout: 16.7%
3. Visual design: 14.5%
4. Features: 8.2%
5. Tone: 6.8%
6. Deals: 4.4%
7. Price: 3.8%
8. Can’t be classified: 2.7%
9. Brand: 1.9%

“Visitors overwhelmingly prefer detail. But they don’t want to be overwhelmed by it,” says Kate Meyer, user experience specialist with Nielsen Norman Group.

If your web page is seriously lacking in the kind of detail that makes visitors want to work with you, increase fact.

Make like a lawyer. Prove your claims. Dig up concrete details — numbers, comparisons, examples and third-party testimonials, for instance — to prove your assertions.

Remember what Texans say about people who are “all hat, no cattle.” Too many pieces of corporate web pages are just that — puffy, overblown chest pounding with little solid evidence to back up the claims.

Don’t let that describe your web page.

2. Reduce fluff.

The second way to improve your fact-to-fluff ratio: Reduce fluff.

“The more florid the descriptions, the more users tune them out and go elsewhere. Sadly, the web is so smothered in vaporous content and intangible verbiage that users simply skip over it.” — Jakob Neilsen, principal, Nielsen Norman…
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Cut hyperbole, adjectives, adverbs and other puffy prose. Strip out “marketingese.”

This promotional language reduces reading, according to Kara Pernice, Kathryn Whitenton and Jakob Nielsen, in How People Read on the Web.

So:

• Cut hyperbole. Minimize modifiers.
• Avoid marketingese and other empty, puffy prose.
• Present information without exaggeration, subjective claims, or boasting.

That’s important.

“The more florid the descriptions, the more users tune them out and go elsewhere. Sadly, the web is so smothered in vaporous content and intangible verbiage that users simply skip over it,” writes Jakob Neilsen, principal, Nielsen Norman Group.

“The more bad writing you push on your users, the more you train them to disregard your message. Useless content doesn’t just annoy people; it’s a leading cause of lost sales.”

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Here’s an interesting dichotomy: Killing time is the killer app for mobile devices. But mobile users are in a hurry and “get visibly angry” at verbose sites that waste their time.

Why?

“Even relaxation is purposeful behavior,” according to usability expert Jakob Nielsen. “In information foraging theory, users seek to maximize their cost/benefit ratio. That is, people want more thrills and less interaction overhead.”

Sadly, interaction costs are inherently greater in mobile — all that swiping and scrolling and trying to remember what you can’t see on the screen adds up.

“Tolerance of padding on mobiles is a lot lower,” counsels the BBC in its writing news for mobile screens guidelines. “So people are even quicker to drop out. You have to get their attention instantly; grab them from the first sentence. It’s too easy to click away.”

So how do you give mobile readers more thrills and less interaction overhead? Cut the blah-blah. Readers won’t put up with filler on their phones.

Cut the blah-blah.

Nielsen once saw this electronic sign in an airport hotel lobby:

Really?! you might ask. This flight monitor will actually … monitor flights?

“Because the monitor’s meaning is obvious to anyone who has ever been on an airplane, the sign adds nothing,” Nielsen says. “Worse, it wastes people’s time as they ponder the cycling text, assuming that it will eventually say something important.”

After all, Nielsen points out, the sign could just say:

Avoid information pollution.

Call it information pollution — “excessive word count and worthless details” that make it hard for people to get good information.

Information pollution not only wastes time, it steals audience attention.

“Each little piece of useless chatter is relatively innocent, and only robs us of a few seconds,” Nielsen says. “The cumulative effect, however, is much worse: we assume that most communication is equally useless and tune it out, thus missing important information that’s sometimes embedded in the mess.”

So cut the fluff.

“In particular, ditch the blah-blah verbiage,” Nielsen says. “When writing for mobile users, heed this maxim: If in doubt, leave it out.”

Filler = bad.

Nielsen also sees this kind of “useless chatter” at the tops of many web pages.

“The worst kind of blah-blah has no function; it’s pure filler — platitudes, such as, ‘Welcome to our site, we hope you will find our new and improved design helpful,’” he says.

“Kill the welcome mat and cut to the chase.”

Filler of all kinds irritates mobile readers. Consider this response from one participant in Nielsen’s mobile usability studies:

She felt duped because she didn’t get enough payoff from her investment of time and effort.

Cut to the chase.

“Let’s clean up our information environment,” Nielsen says. “Are you saying something that benefits your customers, or simply spewing word count? If users don’t need it, don’t write it. Stop polluting now.”

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Lede or lead?

You won’t find it in the Oxford English Dictionary. But the alternative spelling lede was supposedly created during the linotype era so as not to confuse lead with the strip of metal that was used to separate lines of type.

The word lede still looks weird to me. But even if you prefer the spelling lede, remember: Leads lead the reader into the body of your piece.

So what types of web content leads should you try?

4 types of web leads to try

Web content’s not a newspaper story. So instead of news leads, try these four types of web leads:

1. Snappy synthesis

Don’t bury the lead under all of the W’s and H’s. Instead, steal a trick from The New York Times, and try snappy synthesis. Synthesize your subject matter into a short, snappy sentence like this:

2. Stakeholder benefits

Don’t write about us and our stuff. Instead, draw readers in by focusing on how they can use, or benefit from, our products, services, programs and ideas. Here’s how that looks:

3. Data point

Can you illustrate the gist of the story with a startling statistic? If so, try a lead like this, from Visa’s Reading Is Fundamental program, for your web content:

4. Illustration

Show, don’t tell. Illustrate your essential point with an example like this, from an H&R Block survey of kids about taxes:

3 types of web leads to avoid

Don’t treat your web content as a news story … but don’t bury the lede, either. Here are three types of leads to avoid:

1. Abstraction

To draw readers into your web content, write web leads that are concrete, creative and provocative. That means dry, boring, abstract leads like this aren’t a good choice:

2. Background

The background section — aka the blah blah — belongs in the third paragraph. So keep definitions, history lessons and other broader context like this out of the opening paragraph:

3. Welcome text

According to the Nielsen Norman Group, nonessential introductions like this one cause readers to skip your lead:

Ledes should lead

Whichever lead approach you choose for your web content, make sure it’s concrete, creative and provocative. Make sure your lede leads readers into the story — instead of leading them astray.

Regardless of how you choose to spell it.

Learn more

• Learn more about lede (or lead) writing.
• Find out how to organize your message.
• Perfect the paragraph that comes after the lead: the nut graph.

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I don’t know about you, but one of my goals in life is to never write anything that makes my readers throw up, resign or forget where they parked their car.

But that’s actually possible when writing for the web.

That’s because screen reading hurts your web visitors’ eyes, backs and brains.

1. Screen reading hurts readers’ eyes.

Reading on the screen is hard for a simple reason: Our eyes weren’t made to stare at little beige boxes all day. When reading online, your readers face these special eye problems:

• Light. Reading online is like reading with a flashlight shining in your eyes. And you know what happens when you spend your day staring at a lightbulb.
• Blinking. People blink less often when reading online than when reading print. That’s a problem, because blinking is what keeps our eyes moist and relaxed. They also open their eyes wider when reading on the screen. That makes their tears evaporate faster and leads to dry eye.
• Scrolling. The human eye has a normal reflex called optokinetic nystagmus. That’s scientist talk for the way our eyes flit across the screen to follow scrolling type. That constant jumping up and down can wear your readers out, cause eyestrain and cause readers to feel a little seasick. (So you can cause readers to throw up from what you write online.)

• Sore or irritated eyes
• Trouble focusing
• Dry or watery eyes
• Blurred or double vision
• Sensitivity to light
• Shortsightedness

In a 2020 study, more than 9 in 10 the respondents experienced at least one symptom associated with digital device usage.

Mobile matters: Cases of screen sightedness have increased by 35% since smartphones were introduced in the 1990s.

“I’ve had people come to our clinic saying they were going to quit their jobs because they couldn’t take it,” says David Grisham, optometry professor, University of California at Berkeley.

Not exactly the purpose of our intranet, is it?

So you literally can make people resign based on what you write on the web.

Is yours a site for sore eyes?

2. Screen reading hurts readers’ bodies.

Americans are experiencing more back, neck and shoulder problems because of their handheld devices, the American Chiropractic Association announced recently.

Plus, Americans are getting insomnia and body clock confusion from screen reading at night, according to Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. (Another one of my goals in life is to never write anything that makes my readers feel as if they’ve just stumbled off of a flight from Boston to Bhutan.)

Screen reading also causes nausea, headaches and muscle degeneration from sitting, according to the American Cancer Society and The Mayo Clinic. So yes, reading that web page does make your butt look bigger.

Is your site a pain in the ass?

3. Screen reading hurts readers’ brains.

But as writers, our biggest problem is this: Screen reading hurts your brain.

This is your brain on the Web: Constant problem solving (To click or not to click?) plus divided attention (You’ve got mail) lead to cognitive overload.

And cognitive overload, according to Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brain, leads us to lose the ability to think and reason.

In fact, a study by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London showed that online multitasking temporarily lowers your IQ more than smoking marijuana does. (And, from what I’ve read, is not nearly as entertaining a way to get stupid.)

“Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle,” Carr in The Shallows. “That’s the intellectual environment of the Internet.”

This problem multiplies on mobile.

(So, yes, you can make your web visitors forget where they parked the car.)

So how can you write web content that makes readers click instead of gag? Get to the point faster, organize better, make it easier to read and more skimmable.

___

Sources: Bahkir, F. A., & Grandee, S. S. (2020). Impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on digital device-related ocular health. Indian journal of ophthalmology, 68(11), 2378–2383.

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You may have heard that social scientists recently added a new item on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

The classic model of what drives human nature looked like this back in the day:

• Self actualization: the feeling of doing what you were put on this planet to do
• Esteem: feeling good about yourself and what you do
• Social needs: having love, a tribe, companionship
• Safety and security: not being afraid of getting eaten by a tiger
• Physiological needs: food and shelter

Our modern world has revealed another, even more basic human need …

… Wi-Fi.

No kidding! And where’s juice? A charger? These are things we need to live through the day!

Mobile has become central to our readers’ daily life. And that’s a problem. Because it’s a lot harder to reach readers on a phone screen than it is to reach them on a laptop or desktop.

When your web visitors are reading on mobile, they:

1. Devote less attention to your message

Readers pay less attention to your page when they’re on their phone screens than their laptops or desktops. That’s because mobile web visitors are likely to get interrupted at any moment.

• They’re cooling their heels with your blog post at the doctor’s office — when their name is called.
• They’re looking at your Facebook status updates in line at the grocery — when it’s their turn to step up to the cash register.
• They’re researching the date of your webinar on the streetcar when they notice it’s their stop. Not only do they forget the date, but they also forget the fact that you’re having a webinar in the first place.

As a result of all of those interruptions, readers also …

2. Spend less time with your message

People spend an average of 150 seconds on a web page visit on their desktops, but only 72 seconds on their phones, according to Mobile HCI.

Which means that attention spans on mobile devices are half as long as on desktops.

Plus, the average time people spend on a page is going down:

• Average time on screen 2004: 150 seconds
• 2012: 75 seconds
• 2023: 47 seconds

Which means attention spans are down 69% in 19 years.

3. Read more slowly

People read 20% to 30% slower online, according to a survey of nearly 30 years of research by Andrew Dillon, Ph.D., of the University of Texas.

Reading on mobile takes even longer, writes Kate Meyer, a user experience specialist for Nielsen Norman Group. People spend about 30 milliseconds more per word when reading on a phone than when reading on a laptop or desktop computer.

Let’s do the math: If readers spend less time and read more slowly, they’re absorbing less of your message.

4. Understand less of your message

Mobile web visitors also comprehend less of your message.

Web pages are 48% harder to understand on an iPhone than on the big screen, according to research by R.I. Singh and colleagues from the University of Alberta. In the study, web visitors understood:

• 39% of what they read on a desktop screen
• Just 19% of what they read on mobile screens

5. Remember less of your message

Short-term memory is bad and getting worse. (I looked up a short-term-memory loss joke for this spot this morning, but I can’t remember what it was.)

Problem is, we can only remember what we can see. With a 3-by-9-inch screen, we can’t see very much. In fact, content displayed above the fold on a 30-inch monitor requires five screens on a smartphone, according to the authors of User Experience for Mobile Applications and Websites.

Reading your web page on a smartphone is like reading War and Peace through a keyhole.

6. Are less likely to act on your message

When the IRS improved its web pages about tax law changes, employee call center accuracy increased by 10%, reports TJ Larkin of Larkin Communications Consulting.

When the bureau printed the exact same web pages and left them in employees’ cubicles, accuracy increased by 42%.

The best way to move readers to act?

Overcome the obstacles of reading on the small screen.

So how do you reach readers online, even when they’re reading on mobile devices? Get to the point faster, organize better, make it easier to read and more skimmable.

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Tick tock. Visitors spend less than four seconds on 25% of the web pages they visit, according to a study by University of Hamburg and University of Hannover researchers.

Those visits peaked at two to three seconds.

That means that within two to three seconds, web visitors decide that about a quarter of the pages they visit aren’t right for them.

But the longer web visitors stay, the longer they’ll stay.

Should I stay or should I go?

If you can get your visitors to spend 10 seconds on your web page, they’ll likely stay longer. And the longer they stay, writes usability expert Jakob Nielsen, the longer they’ll stay.

To learn that, a researcher named Chao Liu and colleagues from Microsoft Research crunched the numbers on page visit durations for more than 200,000 web pages over nearly 10,000 visits. They learned that the amount of time users spend on a web page follows a “Weibull distribution.”

Easy for them to say.

Weibull is a reliability-engineering model that analyzes the time it takes components to fail. Given that it’s worked fine until now, the model says, it will likely fail at X time.

Most web pages age “negatively.” That is, the longer visitors stay, the longer they’re likely to stay.

How do you keep them longer?

Meet the 30-3-30 test

Back in the mid-20th century, academician and communication theorist Clay Schoenfeld recommended the 30-3-30 rule. That is, you should present your message as if one-third of your audience will give you:

• 30 minutes. These folks are readers, and don’t we wish there were more of them!
• 3 minutes. They’re not reading the text. Instead, they’re flipping, skimming and scanning for key ideas. To reach them, you need to lift your ideas off the screen with display copy.
• 30 seconds. With a 30-second attention span, these folks are lookers. They don’t read words. They’ll learn whatever they can through an image and a bold headline.

That’s for print. Online, add another 3, for people who will give you:

• 3 hours. These folks are researchers. They dive deep for data. Give them bottomless wells of information — libraries and archives of white papers, detailed product specs, PowerPoint decks, full texts of speeches and presentations, and so forth.

“The Internet is for everybody,” write Daniel A. Cirucci and Mark A. Tarasiewicz of the Philadelphia Bar Association. “It’s for the 30-second reader, the three-minute reader, the 30-minute reader and even the three-hour junkie.”

So what does Schoenfeld’s rule look like today? That depends on whom you ask. You may want to pass one of these three tests:

1. 10/30/2 test

According to user research by Microsoft Research, web visitors:

• Decide whether to stay on a page within 10 seconds
• Are likely to stay longer if they make it over the 30-second hump
• At that point, may stay as long as 2 minutes or more

These people don’t read content word by word. So make sure you create scannable content: a visual hierarchy of headings, short paragraphs, and lots of white or negative space.

2. 10/21/2 test

According to an analysis of 50,000 page views by a highly educated European audience:

• Most web visitors stay for 10 seconds or less.
• The average amount of time Americans linger on a web page is 21 seconds.
• About 10% of web views extend beyond 2 minutes.

These folks don’t read on the web. In fact, they read a total of just 20% of the words in a piece of content. Increased scannability can help them find what they are looking for as they scan any new page on your website.

3. 3/10/more test

And that University of Hamburg study? It suggests that you pass the:

3-second test. Hook visitors within two or three seconds. The first question readers ask when they land on a page is “What kind of page is this?” Is it:

• A list of products they might want to buy?
• A forum that might answer their question?
• An article with information they’re seeking?
• A form they can use to book their vacation hotel room?
• An ad?

If they can’t tell within a couple of seconds, chances are you’ll lose them altogether.

Clear page design helps. So make sure your article page looks like an article page, your forum looks like a forum and your ad looks like an ad.

Your web visitors should also grasp instantly what the page is about and why it’s relevant to them. A solid headline and deck will help you make your point quickly.

One-quarter of web pages don’t make it past the three-second scan. But if your web page does pass the three-second test, according to the German researchers, web visitors then spend about 10 seconds scanning the page.

10-second test. Inform visitors within 10 seconds. In the first 10 seconds, web visitors make a critical stay-or-go decision. They don’t dive right into the paragraphs; they scan the page to see whether it fits their needs.

Convince them that it does by lifting your key ideas off the page with scannable microcontent.

One-quarter of web pages don’t make it past that 10-second scan. But if they do stay, visitors look around a bit more.

30-second test. If visitors stay longer than 10 seconds, they look around a bit more. In the next 20 seconds — their first 30 seconds total on the page — they’re still quite likely to leave.

After 30 seconds, though, the curve becomes fairly flat. Visitors continue to leave a page, but much more slowly than they did during the first 30 seconds.

If you can get people to stay for 30 seconds, there’s a good chance that they’ll stay longer — “often 2 minutes or more, which is an eternity on the web,” Nielsen writes.

Tick tock.

What do these scanning patterns tell us? That it’s not enough to draw readers to your page through search engine optimization. Your user interface must support scanning — whether you have 60 seconds with your web visitor or only 16.

“How long will users stay on a web page before leaving? It’s a perennial question, yet the answer has always been the same: Not very long,” Nielsen writes. “To gain several minutes of user attention, you must clearly communicate your value proposition within 10 seconds.”

Web writers and UX designers: That’s a user experience worth aiming for.

___

Source: Jakob Nielsen, “How Long Do Users Stay on web pages?” Nielsen Norman Group, Sept. 12, 2011

Harald Weinrich, Hartmut Obendorf, Eelco Herder and Matthias Mayer; “Not quite the average: An empirical study of web use,” ACM Transactions on the web (TWEB), Vol. 2 Issue 1, February 2008

Luke Wroblewski, “Communicate Quick: First Impressions Through Visual Web Design,” UIE.com, Oct. 1, 2008

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When it comes to web heads, focus on the front.

That is, place your topic words at the beginning of your headline. That approach:

• Signals to Google what your page is about, improving your place on search engine results pages (SERPs)
• Helps readers decide to click your link on SERPS, indexes and other lists

How important is this? It’s the No. 1 thing you can do to improve the ROI of your website, says Jakob Nielsen, “king of usability.”

“Selecting the first 2 words for your page titles is probably the highest-impact ROI-boosting design decision you make in a web project, he says. “Front-loading important keywords trumps most other design considerations.”

How readers read indexes and lists online.

When viewing a list of articles on SERPs, index pages or other story lists, web visitors spend less than one second looking at headlines. That’s according to Eyetrack III, a study of online behavior by The Poynter Institute.

The same thing’s true of the summary blurbs or decks in the index listing.

“The first couple of words need to be real attention-getters if you want to capture eyes,” the researchers say.

What can you tell skimmers in the first 11 characters of your web head?
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Not so fast, says usability guru Jakob Nielsen. He estimates that visitors really scan more like the first 11 characters. What do the first 11 characters of your headlines tell potential readers?

• Use drop-down menus sparingly
• Beyond the Inverted Pyramid
• Drake University campus life
• Introducing Chase Exclusives Special Benefits for Checking Customers
• Don’t let your head get cut off
• How to Write the News Release 2.0
• Your Company Name announces

Make sure the first couple of words tell and sell — tell readers what your story is about and sell them on clicking. Here are 14 ways to do that:

1. Lead with the topic word.

Nielsen suggests that instead of:

Use drop-down menus sparingly

You try:

Drop-down menus: Use sparingly

2. Use the simple sentence structure.

Write subject, verb, object. That forces the subject — aka the topic — to the top. Instead of:

Beyond the Inverted Pyramid

Make it:

Feature stories boost readership

3. Move your organization’s name to the end.

Instead of:

Drake University campus life

Make it:

Campus life at Drake University

4. Make it a label head.

I know. This one makes me feel squeamish, too. It probably works better on a basic web content page than on a story or release:

Social media writing webinar

Nope, I still hate it.

5. Try the passive voice.

I hate this idea, too. But passive voice can help you front-load key words, Nielsen says. For instance:

Passive Voice Is Redeemed For Web Headings

Still hate that one, too.

6. Use plain language and specific terms.

In a test Nielsen ran of what visitors could learn from the first 11 letters of an index listing, this web head scored best:

Gift cards & E-Gift Certificates

7. Avoid marketing fluff.

In Nielsen’s 11-character test, this headline proved to be the least effective:

Introducing Chase Exclusives Special Benefits for Checking Customers

8. Use numerals.

Say more with fewer characters by using numerals, instead of spelling out numbers. Nielsen suggests that instead of:

First two words: A signal for the scanning eye

You make it:

First 2 words: A signal for the scanning eye

Note: AP Style supports this approach.

9. Skip leading articles.

Drop the “a,” “an” or “the.” Instead of:

The approval process syndrome …

Make it:

Approval process syndrome …

10. Consider promoting popular story forms up front.

Got a list or infographic? Consider investing some of your 11 characters in that:

Flowchart: Are you a troll or thought leader?

11. Use your deck in metatags.

At Wylie Communications, we like feature heads almost as much as we like Twix bars:

Don’t let your head get cut off

Web headlines must fit on mobile apps and more

So we’re experimenting with using our descriptive, front-loaded decks in metatags instead:

Web headlines must fit on mobile apps and more

12. Meet readers out front in page titles.

Using that approach, we cause the deck to show up on indexes and SERPs:

Web headlines must fit on mobile apps and more

Both feature head and descriptive deck both show up on content pages:

Don’t let your head get cut off

Web headlines must fit on mobile apps and more

13. Make the topic phrase a kicker.

Move the topic to the top as an additional layer of headline. Instead of:

How to Write the News Release 2.0

Make it:

News release 2.0 — Help Google find your site

14. Check your index pages.

How does your headline show up in SERPs, index pages and other story lists?

When you scan the list of headlines and links, what’s the first word in each item? Is it the topic word? Is it clear, specific and interesting?

For a “how not to” example of making copy list-ready, check out your organization’s index of press release headlines. Most bury the topic word behind:

Your Company Name announces …

How does yours stack up?
_____

Sources: Andy Bechtel, “Writing Headlines for Digital and Mobile Media,” Poynter News University, Dec. 5, 2013

Jakob Nielsen, “Company Name First in Microcontent? Sometimes!” Alertbox, March 3, 2008

Jakob Nielsen, “Passive Voice Is Redeemed For Web Headings,” Alertbox, Oct. 22, 2007

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