How To Improve Website Usability By Improving Content

Content plays an important role in building a relationship with your readers and consequently, converting them into a buyer or a client. Along with good content writing, it’s also quite a prerequisite to present content in an interesting and user friendly way. This goes a long way in improving and influencing your website’s usability. Improving content means improving your website!

1. Headers – Break Up Your Content

Research has shown that internet users don’t view content as a whole like reading a hardbound magazine or book, they look at content in segments or blocks. That’s why, to hold their attention, it’s important to offer your content in blocks.
Moreover, readers on the Web skim through content, skipping a great deal of things that are written in each article or block. They simply pick out what they are looking for. Hence, for a successful communication, it’s absolutely necessary to make this task as easy as possible for the reader.

2. Easy To Read Through Content

The above point brings us to this requirement – content should be easy to skim through. Researchers have found out that people don’t read in a straight manner, but rather in an ‘F’ shaped structure.

Eye movement patterns are known to indicate movement from the left to the right and then skip content and go downwards, repeating the process. Hence, appropriate headers are good for online reading. Rather than bulk content, you can present your work with bullets and numbering, which improves the readability.

3. SEO Optimized Content Sections

The other advantage of having headers is using them as sections for inserting keywords. The best part about headers is that it satisfies your reader’s desire to acquire information and makes the search engine spiders happy because they can crawl and index the right keywords.

4. Sequential Importance Of Information

So now we know that our readers like content to be simplified, we should additionally place the most important information at the beginning. Sequential importance means putting the most crucial part on top and decreasing in importance or relevance the further you go down.

5. Use Images And Strategic Display

Research shows that…

• People pay attention to images well synced in content
• People also ignore images used for decoration or extras

So, as a business person, trying to improve your website’s usability, you should be using images that are displayed smartly across your website. Content with images are appreciated by readers for visual appeal as well as relevance. (Make sure your images are not too heavy and don’t affect your page speed because that would have a negative influence on your website.)

Nevertheless, over and above everything is what you write. Your website usability should be improved by keeping content in mind and at the same time, without compromising on quality.