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Content is king, right?

It takes great content to both 1) optimize your website for high organic rankings on search engines, and 2) communicate the concept and benefit of your business to your web traffic.

Great content is keyword-focused, frequent, and direct. It’s also brief – probably even more brief than you’d want to assume.

This study on web usability highlights some startling facts for those long-winded writers among us (myself included):

• Users tend to spend a baseline of about 25 seconds on your page if they’re actually reading content. In that 25 seconds, they’re reading about 104 words.
• Users only spend 4.4 seconds more on your site for each additional 100 words of content – meaning they’re not really reading it. (Most people read at a rate of about 200 to 250 words per minute.)
• You can assume that web visitors will only read about 20% of your content – and at most about 28%.
• On an average visit, users read about half the information on pages with 111 words or less.

So what’s this all mean? It means web users are trained in the art of scanning – they’re surfing through your site quickly, and using visual items in tandem with text to intuit meaning.

In other words, you need to cut down your text to the most direct and engaging message, communicate your brand with visuals, and rely on visual content structure – things like bullets, headers, titles, and any other text that has visual weight.