“Most people today can’t concentrate on a single screen for more than 47 seconds — while recovering from an interruption can take almost half an hour,” according to the University of California. Ouch. That’s especially serious from a content writing perspective.
How can you make website visitors stay?
“Most people today can’t concentrate on a single screen for more
Well, apart from everything that we’ve covered, such as creating useful content that will actually give an answer to their questions, it’s important to remember that the way you structure and present your content on the page counts for both your readers and Google.
If you present your content the right way, you can fight against that very sad attention span, and Google may reward you, too. Many factors influence this, including user experience or UX as well, but for now, we’re here to learn the SEO best practices.
Let’s see what details you should pay attention to when it comes to optimizing article structure for SEO:
- Make the article easily skimmable.
- Keep the paragraphs fairly short, 3-4 rows each, or around 4-5 sentences, maximum. (As per usual, this is a guide, don’t put too much pressure on this point.)
- One paragraph should cover one idea.
- The most important part of an idea and the related keyword should be mentioned at the beginning of each paragraph to make sure that you answer the question in your heading as soon as possible. This kind of Q&A structuring increases the chances of such content snippets being picked up by Google’s algorithm and used in the SERPs that we discussed.
- Use lists to give healthy breaks in the content, and when that way of organizing information makes sense.
- Use descriptive headings and subheadings (while incorporating target keywords). In other words, when someone (and the algorithm) reads a heading, they should generally know what comes next, and what point will you cover.
- Highlight the more important points visually, whether with a bold font style or any other CMS solutions, such as putting the text in a colored box.
- Use images, videos, and other visual elements to break up the bigger chunks of text, to let the content and the reader breathe, too. Ideally, you should have a visual element at every scroll, whether that’s a simple image, a graph, a screenshot, profile pictures of people quoted, other highlighted quotes, statistics, videos, or animations. However, don’t spend too much time on the “every scroll” role as screen sizes and so “scroll sizes” differ.
“Short paragraphs get read.
Jason Fried, Basecamp
Long paragraphs get skimmed.
Very long paragraphs get skipped.“
In the final two email lessons, I’ll tell you how creators can use the right SEO tactics and sell without being pushy (the thing many of you hate and I can relate).
This will include forming your mindset a little when it comes to marketing and positioning your brand and works, and sharing tips that you can instantly start using to improve the performance of your webshop and commercial pages.