Now your site’s been up a few weeks or even a few months. Your traffic is zilch despite a robust marketing package. Where did you go wrong? Are you really horrible at web development?
Probably not. If you’re an engineer in the tech industry, your focus is on technology. You know how to build things, but do you know how to build things specifically for people? User experience, especially writing for UX is web development geared toward people. Today we’re going to talk about why that’s important.
The Way We Speak to the User Defines How They Act
You want your customers to either buy or test out your product. How then do you get them to do that? In a physical store, you could simply run a demo. All they need to do is try it out to decide. In the virtual space, they can’t do this. The only way to convince someone of anything is to create a bond with that person. The first thing you do should never be to list product specs.
Of course, a list of product specs should be somewhere on your site, but that’s not going to draw the user in. Instead, you must get the user to invest time and energy in understanding your product.
People do things quickly online. Their attention is short. But when they read online, they slow down. In fact, they slow down about 25%. To understand how to draw the user in, it’s important to understand what reading does to your customer.
What Reading Does to the Brain and Why You Should Care
We’ve been reading for about 5000 years now. The written word is as integral to our societal function as speaking and listening.
We’ve adapted to the written word and now use areas of the brain once reserved for other tasks. It especially engages the part of our brain that interprets spoken language and vision.
This is why you can possibly both hear and imagine what you read. But reading does more than just give us auditory and visual hallucinations. It changes how we feel and how we function.
Reading Increases Connectivity
Associations can be as real for some as temporal experiences are to others. If you say the word moist, some people associate that word with something disgusting and react viscerally.
Reading increases associative function in the brain. When you need to draw connections between an idea and a thing or a metaphor and the real world example, your brain must reach across hemispheres.
And they’ve found that when you read, you’re more receptive to language for several days afterward. Thus if you read more often, you’ll be more receptive to new knowledge and make better connections in between ideas and memories in your brain.
This is especially useful to you as a business owner. If you can craft your user experience writing such that it engages users, they’ll be more receptive to info about your product farther down the marketing funnel.
Increases Working Memory
Why do you forget things? Your brain isn’t a hard drive. It’s a dynamic organ that keeps you alive and engages with the world.It can only retain so much information. But like your muscles, it can increase in capacity. One of the best ways to improve your working memory is to read. How does it do this? It makes your brain work more.
When you read, your brain must infer meaning from the code (written word) on the page. In other words, it must work to dig deeper than mere visual information.
According to Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, “Reading is about not being content with the surface.” Thus, when you make your users read, you’re making them dissatisfied.
This sounds cruel, but what is marketing but the creation of dissatisfaction anyways? You want your customers to be dissatisfied enough with what they already have to want what you can give them.
Reading Expands a User’s Attention Span
Most of the internet is a jumble of images and video. These things aren’t very good for our attention span. They split our attention.
But reading does the exact opposite according to Susan Greenfield, a neuroscientist. While the internet’s improved our short-term memory, it’s destroyed out long term memory and our ability to focus for long periods.
But when we read, we have to slow down and think about the information. We have to pay attention to “get it.” Bounce rate is a huge problem for marketers and web developers. Most websites see a pretty high bounce rate at 26-70%.
But if you can get your users to stick around longer, they’ll be more likely to explore and possibly buy. The best way to do this is through writing for a great UX.
Writing for User Experience Should Be Your Top Priority
When it comes to SEO and web development, marketers often forget about the people they’re trying to speak to. They refer to them as leads and customers. This says a lot about their mindset.
But Google’s already made the shift toward marketing to people rather than leads. Are you? Your SEO content should keep the user experience in its sights at all times. If you’re looking to up your UX game and want great SEO services, contact us today.
