No one wants to wait in line, and no one wants to read your website. Yet the problem is not the amount of text, it’s more about the design and approach to content that gets your feathers in a ruffle. Here’s how to solve it.
“Too Much Text” Really Means “I Won’t Read This”
Yes, the problem is clear, but cutting the text won’t solve the problem. The problem is bad text design, or typography on your website that shuts off your visitor’s brain on contact. To explain this, we need a simple reminder on psychology.
Your brain is always at work, and due to our nature is looking for the simplest road to the goal in our minds. It’s why people will buy exercise tapes instead of exercise. The simple road is to buy the tape, instead of the hard work of actually exercising. The same goes with reading. When a user lands on a long page of content, in small type, in large 5-6 sentence paragraphs, their brain instantly “rejects” the idea of wanting to read that page because it’s work.
Conversely, you could take the same content, and break it up in shorter sentences, with titles that can be scanned, and achieve a huge engagement rate. This is called “scannable content” and it’s how most good content on the website is formatted.
So it’s not the length of the content, it’s the appearance of work in reading your text that causes most of your issues.
You Need Text for SEO Content Design
Yes, you need text, and lots of it for good search engine optimization. Without text, Google cannot understand the context of your website and how you fit into the problems looking to be solved online. To simply state you want to start cutting text, and having more pictures instead of text would be SEO suicide. Google is getting smarter, but until they can understand pictures, you’re best playing by their rules.
Good SEO content design text can make or break your site. Invest your time in good content and blogging to help your site grow and capture more search traffic.
Some Resources on Content Design
Now that you understand the need for good SEO content design, here are some resources that can help you create new designs for your content that can ease readability and conversion.