Is Your Blog Reader Optimized?

You have nailed your blog’s technical aspects. It's been painstakingly designed, coded and optimized for mobile and SEO. But, it’s still not performing as hoped or as expected. That may be because it's not reader-optimized. To be blunt, nobody wants to read it. And if they don't actually read it, you will see almost no traffic and zero social shares.

Here are a few things you can do to improve your blog's reader experience.

1. Upgrade Your Host and Your Speeds

Your visitors may not even get the chance to read your content if you’ve gone with a cheap or free web hosting company. Cheap web hosting leads to slow speeds and spotty performance, which is why you will want to always go with the fastest Wordpress hosting that you can find.

Paying a little bit more will give you far better performance. Sites that load before the 5-second mark see 70% longer sessions than slower pages.

2. Upgrade Your Headlines

Don’t ask for your reader’s click. Earn it. Your headline is the key to unlocking their click and their attention. You don’t need shock value or sensational “What Happens Next Will Shock You” Buzzfeed-level headlines. However, you do need to make some sort of emotional connection.

Let’s say you’re a garage and you want to publish a blog about winter road safety. You may choose a blog title such as, “The Top 5 Emergency Roadside Safety Kit Items.” That’s pretty flat.

Make an emotional connection and try something like, "How Long Would You Survive Being Trapped on a Freezing Highway?" This will cost you nothing but a little bit more time and thought. Take the time to figure out your readers’ pain points and ask what will resonate with your target audience.

3. Break up Your Text

This is a pretty widespread problem with blogs in the tech sector. Trying to convey very technical and complex information often leads to long paragraphs and bulky blogs.

It also leads to a passive voice, run-on sentences and lots of industry jargon. This may be because the author is used to academic writing. And academic writing is not digestible writing.

Yes, you want to sound as knowledgeable and authoritative as possible in your blog. However, you don’t create that voice with big words and big paragraphs. Using brevity and simplicity to explore complex terms shows that you have the highest level of understanding on a given topic.

Big chunks of text could scare away your would-be readers, as they may find it off-putting or intimidating. Break your text up with as many paragraph breaks as possible, while utilizing lots of headings and bullet point/ number lists.

Remember, Google’s bots will crawl your site’s coding and text, but human beings are ultimately still the audience you need to impress. Ensure bad hosting isn’t slowing you down. At the same time, make your content enticing with sharp headlines and easily digestible paragraphs will ensure you have a properly optimized reader experience.

Keeping these things in mind can help you boost an underperforming site’s traffic and ranking. They can also help you ensure that your next site is set up the right way from the very start.