Content Optimization: 5 Reasons Why Shorter Is Better (TL;DR)

 Can you perform content optimization on your website to get better conversion rates, as well as you adapt continually your speech to have more impact to your audience in real life? Your website is a conversational interface with your visitors, and in many respects we can compare the navigation on it, to our talk mechanisms.

TL;DR: Passion Is The Enemy Of Conciseness

 

Who has never been into this embarrassing and, quite frankly, somehow degrading, situation when you lose the attention from the interlocutor you’re talking with?

• When you discuss with a friend on a subject that passionates you, then you suddenly realize that he is now more interested in this person with a red dress behind you than your speech ..

• When you are in this meeting with a prospect, explaining him with from a new perspective, why your technology is the best .. but he looks at his watch ..

• When you are in front of an audience and move off the topic for 5 minutes on something that was not in the plan of your intervention (for a good reason), then realize that everyone switched on his mobile phone during this time ..

It is not because your topic is not interesting.

It is because you already said too much about it.

Because you are passionate by this topic.

And because you don’t know when to stop yourself.

Why is it a bigger problem than it looks at first?

• You don’t follow your objective at this moment

• You lose your aura and credibility

• You are boring. Who wants to be boring?

The EXACT same idea apply to your website.

It is sometimes hard to shorten the content on your pages -your speech- to the essential, because you have so much to say! Nevertheless, optimizing your content is an absolute necessity to improve the usability of your website. Here are 5 reasons to convince you:

1. Keep It (Stupid) Simple

Stop losing visitors that are not your relatives.

 

Your passion is not their passion – You can not expect from your audience to keep a level of attention as its maximum if your topic is not also one of their main concerns, or passion. And it is not a breaking news that all your interlocutors won’t share the same points of interest, nor your own interests and knowledge.

Don’t overwhelm your visitors by informations they can not process.

 

If you have to explain the joke, there is no joke – And if you must explain something to someone several times under different perspectives to demonstrate your point, then you probably don’t talk to the right person, or the speech you choose to present is not the right one, which points out a lack of preparation, or anticipation. In both cases, it is already too late.

On your pages, choose a simple message that resonate, and optimize in time.

 

When it comes to jokes, less is more – French say, translation of Les plaisanteries les plus courtes sont les meilleures. French use this adage to stop an embarrassing situation when a joke runs for too long already. In fact, at this moment it is already too late, and the damage is done. A second literal reading tells us that your speech will have an impact inversely related to its length – it is subject to some debate but gives one more point to this statement:

The content of your pages must be simple, clear, and SHORT.

2. Ever Heard Of The Sales “Closing” Step?

Ask yourself why people in sales always keep surprises for the end.

 

In the sales area, the “closing” step is the most important step of the sales process. It is the moment when your prospect is going to chose you over the competition, and sign your contract.

Buyers are hard to manage, and everything can turn in the favor of a competitor at any moment. For this step, better be armed with something, and this is why sales people will always keep a few cards in their stack for the last part of the process.

Consider the same for your website:

Don’t play all your cards on your homepage or landing pages. Opt for a meaningful and impactful message, but pay attention to keep some good surprises for your conversion funnels, that will help maintain your audience’s interest and attention until the end of the process.

3. Go For The Right Aim

You want your visitors to adhere to your idea and buy your product, not that they know everything about it.

 

Reasons why you believe in your idea are not what will convince your audience. The idea itself is, as well as the way to introduce it.

What will interest your prospects will never be your technological decisions, your company spirit or the organization you adopted, even if those are better than your competitors’ ones.

On your website, your content must focus on 2 questions regarding your visitors:

• Can this product solve one of their problems? What is the idea of your product, which problem it solves, how does it solve it?

• Why must they necessarily buy it? What is their gain to do so, what risks do they take if they don’t?

Everything else is unnecessary. Not useless, but unnecessary.

Cut the unnecessary content to the strict minimum. Focus on those questions.

4. One Single Persuasive Sentence Can Be Enough To Make It

This sentence you say, then suddenly you know it is a done deal.

 

It is the best moment, in your meeting, in your discussion, in your conference. When your know, by observing nonverbal reactions from your audience, that after telling this very sentence, you just acquired their adhesion and empathy, and that they will now follow you anywhere:

• You made the deal, it is not signed yet, but you have been able to strike the chord with this buyer, saying the very sentence that now gives you the advantage over the competition.

• You just convinced your friend that your vision of the topic is better than his/hers, and that now he/she can only recognize that you are right.

• You just transformed this regular public intervention in a source of inspiration for your audience, and your last words will be noted down and spread over social networks.

Your Value Proposition is the transposition of this language “killer-feature” in your content optimization process.

TheFamily’s CEO Oussama Ammar says your Value Proposition is both:

• “what is sufficient to convince someone to sign up”

• “the promise of the value you will deliver”

• “the main reason why people will sign-up”

 Turn on the subtitles and enjoy a great definition of your Value Proposition in 1minute.

Determine and test (then optimize, and start over) a short and efficient value proposition that secures engagement from your audience and drag high conversion rates.

5. Your Website Usability Depends On It

Check your content’s impact and conciseness thanks to analytics.

 

The bad side, when you are too talkative in any discussion, is that you will figure it out only when it will be too late, and you will have miss an opportunity at this point. So, you will step back afterwards, analyse the reasons behind this failure, and learn from your mistake, in order to improve your speech for next time.

Once again, the same principle can be applied to the content optimization on your website. And the answer will come from your indispensable analytics platforms. Because, for any introspection, the most important thing is to ask the right questions.

So, what questions may you ask yourself to know if you must work on optimizing content on your website?

• Are some of your visitors leaving the navigation unexpectedly?

• Do some of your pages generate lots of tabs openings?

• What share of the audience does not even enter your conversion funnels?

• What time is spent of information pages, and conversion pages?

Understand the weaknesses of your content that break the usability of your website, by generating dispersion and leavings, thanks to analytics tools like google analytics or Onbrowse.io (our own Analytics Software for UX).