How People Read Content Online - Statistics and Trends

/ Zach Heller

The following post was written by Asad Ali. Asad Asad Ali is a digital marketing expert having more than 8 years of experience. Currently he is working at GO-Gulf – a website development company based in Dubai, where he has worked on numerous eCommerce SEO projects & successfully run digital marketing campaigns.

Now people don’t read the online content in the way they do years before. Knowing about the behaviors and interests of your online readers is significant in order to optimize the digital content accordingly. Eventually you have put so much effort in generating top quality content but still, you are complaining about low user's engagement, the main reason is the changes that occur in the reading habits. Now, most of the people only emphasize scanning the content rather than reading through the whole web page.

After creating the content it is significant to share it on social media platforms, as without much exposure no one will get aware with the presence of the content.

Users communicate with the content in the form of skimming, scanning, and reading. People also get attracted to the content of their interest. A relevant and context-based content that resonates with the user's area of expertise appeals more, as people tend to read about the things they love the most.

From the year 2000 to 2018, it is estimated that the rate of reader’s attention towards the content has gradually decreased from 12 seconds to 8 seconds.

In the presence of huge information in the form of web pages, only 55% of the web pages get noticed for 15 seconds.

It is also observed that the left half of the web page gets more concentration by the users than the right half, as 69% of them get prompted towards left half and only 30% towards the right.

80% of the reader’s attention is towards the information present above the fold and only 20% get interested in the information present below the fold.

The readers who keep on reading the content from a web page for three minutes are likely to return back as compared to those who only bother to read it for just a minute.

For an individual post, a reader only conceive 20% of the whole information present on the web page, however, only 10% to 20% make it to the bottom of the page.

When it comes to the brand identity, 25% of the users who get engaged with a web page that is related to any brand for more than 15 seconds, the chances are they can remember its name for long, as compared to those who only spend 10 or less number of seconds.

The stories on the web pages that are more elaborate, having more than 1000 of word count; get more users’ retention than those with less number of words.

You can find more facts and statistics in the infographic below that is composed by Go-Gulf.

How to Get More People to Link to Your Site

/ Zach Heller
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The more people that link to your site, the more authority you have on the web. Inbound links carry with them a lot of benefit…

  • Higher domain authority raises your likelihood of ranking nearer to the top of search results for relevant keyword phrases

  • Higher page authority for the pages being linked to raises the chances of high value pages showing up on page one

  • Links from websites and articles with lots of traffic could send some of that traffic through to your website

But acquiring those inbound links requires some amount of effort on your part. Though it would be great to expect to achieve success in this area organically, for most of us, it’s not so simple.

So what can you do to get more inbound links?

1. Improve the Quality of Your Content

Nobody wants to link to crappy content. Misspellings and typos, poorly written articles, ugly layouts and visual style, can all impact the perceived quality of content on your website. When given the option of linking to a page with better writing, clearer explanations, and more appealing design, any author or publisher will choose that over the garbage on offer over on your website. By improving the overall quality of your content, you make it more likely that people will link out to it.

2. Fill a Gap in the Marketplace

Do you have the ability to add value in a way that nobody else does? Perhaps you have a level of expertise that is worth sharing, or a fresh take on an old debate or problem? The web is chock full of content, but most of it is not what we would consider unique. If you can create something that is truly new and interesting, people will have no choice but to link to it.

3. User Generated Content

When you get other people involved in the development of your content, you create a different incentive for links. Now the people who have contributed have reason to tell their networks and friends. This creates a type of word of mouth virality that most static content you create yourself won’t have.

4. Develop an Outreach List

One of the most underrated ways to attract new links is to simply ask for them. But before you can start, you need to know who to ask.

An outreach list is a list of bloggers, writers, reporters, websites, publishers, etc. that write about things related to your business. This is a list of people that you want to develop a relationship with, in hopes that they will write about your business, or link to content that you yourself have published.

5. Actively Seek Links

When you are reaching out to the people on your outreach list, you want to be explicit about why. You have developed something that you think they would be interested in. You think their readers would be interested in it. Writers are looking for things to write about, and so want to showcase the value on offer to them.

6. Deploy a Press Strategy

Make news. Do something newsworthy. I’m not talking about publicity stunts here, but I do mean that you should create an intentional strategy that gets the press interested in your business. Celebrity endorsements, live events, major business deals, customer successes, etc. are all ways to build a little hype around your brand. News articles offer potential high-quality links.

7. Know Your SEO

A not so dirty secret is that pages that already rank higher in search results are more likely to attract more links. That’s because people will often use search to find the resources they use when developing their content. And they are more likely to find content that already has a high ranking. So in addition to everything written above, it is important to have a solid SEO strategy that consistently drives your site up toward the top of the rankings. The higher you go, the more likely some publisher is to find you on their own.

3 Simple Changes That Will Supercharge Your Content

/ Zach Heller
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Content marketing is an all-encompassing term that has peaked and fallen off in years past. But just because use of the term is on the decline, doesn’t mean that successful content marketing strategies are any less effective.

In fact, the companies that are succeeding with content are using it to drive more sales, more loyalty, more brand awareness, higher levels of community engagement, and more.

But too many companies are still wasting their time doing content for content’s sake. It’s time to take a hard look at the return on investment of your content marketing efforts. What is it doing for you? What value is it adding?

If your content marketing is barely moving the needle, you need to make some changes. And if you are not ready to throw in the towel for good, you need to test some new practices that have potential to improve your results.

Here are three things you can do to get more about of your content marketing efforts:

1) A/B Test Your Headlines

Just like we test different subject lines for our emails, in an effort to get more people to open and read them, we should test different headlines for any piece of content.

A good headline makes all the difference. The right headline grabs attention and leads a user to view the piece of content we publish.

And though there are countless resources for best practices when it comes to headline writing, the only way to know for sure what headline will attract more readers is to test them in the real world. A free tool like Google Optimize will allow you to test multiple headlines for every article and settle on the one that gets the most visits, clicks, reads, conversions, etc.

2) Make It Easy to Share

The sites that succeed with content benefit from engaged readers/users. As a company, there is only so much that you can do to promote your content by yourself. To get real results, you need to leverage the virality of the web.

Content that is easy to share is more likely to get shared.

Making your content easier to share is not hard. There are existing plugins you can add to your website that allow people to publish to their preferred social network with one click. And you can (and should) customize the way your content appears when someone adds them to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and others.

3) Invest in Media

Too many marketers treat content as a one-size-fits-all process. We write blog posts and articles and hope they get shared. But this outdated vision of the web is bound to fail.

Today, there are so many different formats to experiment with, that if you only write articles, you shouldn’t expect to succeed.

It make take more time and money to create engaging video content, live video, Snaps, images and infographics, but this is exactly the type of content that gets shared. The content and the audience should determine the format, not the team you have or the budget you’re working with.

If budget and people are limiting factors for your company, perhaps you should invest elsewhere and ignore content marketing for now.

What is Your Content Marketing For?

/ Zach Heller
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Content marketing has been the “it” thing for online marketers over the last half decade. You have likely seen the headlines or heard the advice – if you run an online business, you have to be doing content marketing.

But why?

First, it helps to quickly explain what content marketing is. You might think you know, but the term has quickly been adapted to mean lots of different things to different companies. So an overview here will help.

What is Content Marketing

Content marketing comes in many forms. But they all share two things in common. They are pieces of content intended for prospective customers. And they are not ads.

They might be blog posts, articles, lists, images, videos, stories, or experiences. They might live on your website, on social media, on websites you work with or advertise on.

Why Content Marketing

The reason that content marketing became so popular is because there has been a general rebellion against all things advertising. The theory (and evidence proves this) is that customers are so overloaded with ads these days that they are adapting to them. In other words, they are better able to recognize when they are being advertised to when that advertising is more traditional (think banners and billboards and commercials), and in turn are better able to tune them out or ignore them.

Content marketing is the brand’s answer to that. By offering up free content intended to engage with potential customers, the goal is to bring them into, or move them through, the marketing funnel without traditional advertising.

What is Your Content Marketing For

That brings us back to the question in the title. Just like anything else that marketers do, your business must have a defined reason for getting started with content marketing. What is your goal?

Many companies today spend time and money on content marketing for no other reason other than they feel it’s something they are supposed to do. Or maybe someone on the board or in the executive office told them that they wanted to see more content marketing.

But unless you have identified a clear goal, how do you know if you’re succeeding?

Success in content marketing will look different for different brands. Some have seen great success writing articles for their users. These users spend more time with the brand, and become more valuable customers.

Some have seen similar success with Facebook videos – which are funny and engaging and easily shareable. Users end up disseminating these videos and the brand’s recognition grows accordingly.

These are two examples, of hundreds. So your job today is to decide why you are doing content marketing? What is the goal?

Once you’ve defined a goal for your organization, you will know what kind of content will help you achieve that goal.

Simple Website Fixes – Part 9

/ Zach Heller

Welcome to the latest edition of our newest weekly blog series, Simple Website Fixes. Each week we will identify and explain one easy change that you can make to your company’s website in order to improve performance. Last week’s fix was – Use Buttons.

This week’s fix = Add Video

We can go ahead and admit that video is not easy, and so it might not seem like a perfect fit for this series on “simple” fixes. But, let’s pretend for a minute that you have the budget and/or capabilities to create quality videos for your site.

If so, then adding them is simple. Hosting them on YouTube or Vimeo and embedding them, or simply adding a custom video player to your website is something any junior developer can do.

Why is this a fix?

Video has taken over for text as the dominant content type on the web. 3.25 Billion hours of video are watched on YouTube alone each month. This is a video-driven world and if you have something to say, you are better off saying it with video than any other medium.

Adding video to your sales pages will help engage your audience. Adding video to your blog pages will keep people around longer. Adding video to your landing pages will make people more likely to convert.

Video holds several advantages to text.

  1. It is easier to consume.
  2. You can say more with less.
  3. You can showcase products better than text and images alone.

If your site is light on video, starting to populate more videos should help you turn more visitors into customers.

Have an idea for a simple website fix? Submit it here and maybe we will include it in an upcoming post.