Writing for the Web is an art in itself and there are three key reasons for this:

1) Attention spans are shorter than ever

In an era where a great deal of content is consumed on mobile devices, our attention span has now slumped to less than eight seconds, shorter than that of goldfish.

If that stat is true and you’re still reading, you’re doing well!

2) We have a global audience 

Our content – once consigned to print, radio and TV in designated geographies – is visible everywhere by people with a good level of English. Many of them are potential customers or advocates.

3) Search engines

When people use search engines they use plain English, whether it’s text or voice search.

The enemy of all these three is corporate speak. [Continues]

Kill corporate speak

Corporate speak is becoming less and less relevant.

I wrote an article for PR Week as long ago as 2008 appealing for an end to corporate speak. As a former journalist, I’ve been confounded by the ways businesses have found increasingly complex ways to describe what they do, as if using expansive language actually makes them sound more professional.

In earnest, the reverse is true; many organisations sound the same. They’re all global leaders providing a wide range of innovate business solutions and services.

The problem is that when we go online, we don’t search for ‘innovative business solutions provider’, we look for ‘accountancy software’ or similar plain English with a view to answer our query.

Plus corporate speak is just plain dull. Companies should be optimising more of their content around how they solve business problems rather than pushing what they sell.

As marketing legend Seth Godin said; “If you can’t state your position in eight words, you don’t have a position.”

This is what people want. And increasingly, as Google gets more intuitive, the people get what the people want served up to them.

Writing for the Web is an art

There’s more to writing for the Web than just plain English, of course.

There are two audiences to impress: humans and search engines.

How we break up copy to make it easy to read is key as we increasingly scan content to get what we need or want from an article.

You’ll notice that my sentences are short and that the opening, above the fold gambit that people are most likely to read is bulletised as a list. This is to impress the human audience. They get what they need.

To impress the search engine is also key. This means doing the search engine optimisation (SEO) housekeeping to make sure that search engines can read and index your copy, and deem it relevant and significant to potential searching audiences.

Data is key to success

The only way we can understand how our content is performing is through regular data analysis and iteration. Are people reading our content? When are they dropping off and why might that be? What is their click path? Are they sharing our content?

These are all questions we need to answer if we want to succeed.

We run training sessions on Writing for the Web. If your business is struggling to articulate its offering online, then please contact us.

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