In the previous posts we discussed two of the important aspects of a website’s Conversion Architecture: the website’s USP and the importance of profiling your customers online. This post will present a content formula to design the content of the internal pages of the site.
If you have dealt with the pillars of Conversion Architecture correctly, you should get a stream of segmented visitors going to your internal pages along with visitors that landed directly on those (designed for conversion) internal pages of your website. All of this makes the internal pages very important, so special attention is needed to their content.Internal Pages Content Stats and What They Mean
Studies show that the average time someone spends on an internal page is 45 seconds.
Is 45 seconds enough time to read a full page of text…? Well, obviously the answer is “No”. This means that your text should be structured in a way that it could be scanned by the reader, highlighting the more important words and broken down to paragraphs and bullets.
Taking into account that the average number of (mouse) scrolls on an internal page is 1.3, it is important to make sure that the most important content and the important calls to action are located at the top of the page (“above the fold”).
Match Content to your Target Audience
Take this recommendation as a baseline: text should be written at a grade level of 13 years old or to target audience.
A bit confusing? Not really: With the lack of a specific target audience – write your content to match a 13 years old visitor. However, your content should be written to your target audience and you may write differently for each profile. If you profile your customers by their age you would speak very differently to a 25 year old then you would a 75 year old. If you profile them by company size you will speak differently to a small business owner then a large corporation.
Learn from the successful sales people: they know how to speak directly to their audience and adapt the pitch to the person or people in front of them.
The words you use, the benefits you have, the reasoning you use should fit the person who is reading it.
Think of your page content as your sales person and try achieving the same level of communication. If you are facing problems doing that, try thinking what a prospect would need to see/read/hear before making a decision. Basically – how a sales call would go. This is typically the same information that could go on the website. If it is built this way, conversions will increase.
The Internal Page Content Formula
So, here is the basic formula that you should follow when writing content for your interior pages:
First you want to show that you understand their problem or need;
Then you want to focus on the benefits of fixing that problem;
Only then present the features.
With anything that you write, make sure to be using informative headlines and make the text easy to scan as most people do not read every single word on a web page.
To summarize, design your website with conversion architecture in mind. Match the content to your target audience, make it “scannable”, pay attention to your headlines and structure the content so it leads from understanding the need to the benefits of a solution and only then to the features.
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