Who’s reading your home page?

Being a 70’s man (sshhh) one thing I have noticed steadily is that we live in a busy, busy world and the truth can be said online. We munch through the millions of pages on the internet that are available to us, which mean filtering out the adverts and irrelevant information when we can.

If you are a  website owner the chances of people reading and absorbing your fantastic new offer becoming unlikely if its not important to them.  In fact you can categorise them into three ways.

1. READERS
2. SCANNERS
3. BOTTOM FEEDERS

It is possible to tailor your landing page to cater for all three key types.   By understanding the psychology of your viewers and how they absorb your information you can make a much more effective website with a higher conversion rate.lets go through your potential client types.

READERS

The rarest type if your website does not rely on loyal followers and your advertising products and services.  These guys read word for word from the top of the page right down to the footer, subscribe and eat everything you say.  Unfortunately you will rare…  think about it its called an internet ‘BROWSER’ not an internet ‘READER’  haha.  Anyway you will always have the potential reader for example if they had been referred to your site by a friend or have pre-selected your services/product and just need to be made secure.  To cater for these guys all you need to do is keep your website content rich, relevant and well written.

 SCANNERS

These types read snippets such as your headlines, maybe a few sentences and if they are still interest will simply whisk through focusing on subheading, highlighted words and also images. All this sub consciously to see if the page is worth reading.

SCANNER STATISTICALLY MAKE UP THE OVER WHELMING MAJORITY OF YOUR PAGE VISITORS

Some research has proved that scanners spend about 80% of their time just looking at info above the fold (the part of the page that’s visible without having to scroll).

So how do you reach them– Get your most important points first so the scanners don’t have to scroll down to find it. Why not use strong subheadings on the left-hand side with bold key words and phrases, so they can easily identify which sections are of interest.

BOTTOM FEEDERS

These guys will read your headlines and also a few lead sentences, and then skip right down to the end of the post or page, where they expect to see a summary of what you have to offer.   This will be followed by a terminal area decision.  If the like what they have seen so far they will scroll back up and read much carefully or exit the page or your website completely.

Being relevant is ultimately important.

One thing these three type of visitors have in common is that they are relying on finding relevant content instantly.  No-one will spend the time to read your content just on the off chance that the information contain ‘may’ have relevance.  Make your points sharp and get the point across quickly.

Angie Schottmuller  proclaims that viewers are looking for content that matches the triangle of relevance.

Here is her question process:

1. Does the landing page appeal to the user’s interests?
2. Is the landing page relevant now to visitors?
3. Does the landing page serve our business objective?

……TO BE CONITINUED