WSI Digital Marketing Blog

This is post 3 of our 4 part series on our discussion of the importance of engaging in Blogging, Social Media and Content Marketing to enhance your business’ digital marketing efforts and overall visibility online.

Website Content vs Print Content

As you begin to write compelling content for your new blog and website, you need to understand that writing a blog post is different to that of writing for print. People read differently from a screen than from a printed page. With Content Marketing, you are writing for two audiences: your visitors and the search engines.

There is a difference to how people read web content vs printed content. People will read something more completely when it is written on paper compared to a website where they skim the information that is presented to them looking for headings and links that would interest them. They usually tend to ignore details, reading only short paragraphs or bulleted lists especially when they contain the keywords that they used to find your website.

Why is this?

People read paper documents 25% faster than screen content. It is proved that it is physically harder to read from a screen as it is harder on the eyes. There are many reasons for this such as font size, sharpness in the font, position of the screen or the contrast.

In print, you can control the reader from introduction to conclusion. With blog and website content the visitor is in control and they choose their own path of what to read next. They will also follow the navigation and links according to what interests them.

On screen, few people read everything on the page. Most will scan the page looking for the information they are after. They can skip whole blocks of text, particularly longer paragraphs. It is the same way a graphic designer will attract your attention to elements with color or a web copywriter attracts with format and structure of the page layout. This suggests that using headlines, bold, bulleted lists and italics can help you attract the reader to your message. When your important information is part of a longer paragraph it is more likely to be overlooked.

For effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) results, understanding how search engines index content is important. Search engines spider text and not images so it is always important to write with keyword rich text using keywords in headlines, links, lists and bold print. This is what search engines “see” as important.

My next post is the last in this series where we discuss developing your Content Marketing strategy.

Learn more about how you can increase your search engine rankings and develop an ongoing search engine optimization strategy for your business.