Striving for an “F” Online

Will you read this article all the way through? Probably not. Here’s the punch line:
The most important pages of your website are failing to live up to their potential.

You know that in your gut, but can’t prove it. Well, let’s try. Answer these 3 questions first.

• Which page of your website is the most important to achieving your online goals?
• Which page is most popular with visitors?
• Are they the same page? If not, why not?

Now, open your browser and pull up one of these pages from your site. How many words are on the page? Seriously. Go ahead and count them. Now multiply that by 20%. That’s the number of words your average visitor reads, according to a recently released study¹.

If your page contains 500 words of text, your visitor will read 100 of those. Eye tracking studies² tell us that people view a web page in an "F" pattern, and focus on information that's presented in the headline, subheads, first 2 paragraphs and bulleted lists. They quickly scan for information related to whatever search brought them to the page.

Next question. How many text links appear in the most heavily read copy of the page? Clicking hypertext links is the most used feature on any web ite.³ Your website and users are NOT the exception to this rule.

Last question? Where is your navigation, logo, text? A study by Neurofocus⁴ says that if your logo and navigation are on the right, and your text is on the left, website users will have a harder time processing the information on the page. Their brains aren’t wired that way. A web audit can help you identify problems like this.

So, are your most important and popular pages failing? Do you even know which pages those are? Do you need help with conversion on your site? If so, send us an email and we’ll set up a time to talk.