6 Best Practices to Ace Your Content Usability

It takes less than a minute for visitors to decide whether they want to stay on your website. While everyone strives to create high-quality content for their websites, every piece of content either converts or loses the visitors to your competitors. So, your goal should be to keep them engaged and convert them into customers.

Content marketing has long been associated with high conversion rates and increased ROI. Everyone lives by the motto – quality over quantity. But how do you make sure that your content converts?

We have some answers for you. In this crisp read, we will walk you through the importance and the best practices of content usability and conversion.

What Makes Content Usable?

Digital business is all about nurturing a customer relationship in the long run. Content works as a mediator in that relationship. Your content creates impact when it reflects your expertise in a field and touches your customers’ pain points. So, you have to make sure that your content directly speaks to the customer’s needs.

Let’s define content usability. Usability is the ability of your content to help users progress or make decisions (take action) by reading it. If customers want to learn about your company, your content should reach them directly.

Your content must be both relevant and useful to assist your customers in accomplishing their objectives. One reason that customers cite for perceiving content as unhelpful is that it is basic, generic, or vague. The second reason they give is a lack of detailing.

Factors That Make Your Content Usable

These are some of the factors that contribute to lower conversion rates. So, what makes for high-converting content? Let’s have a look at some of the factors that make your content usable.

• Quality and Usability Go Parallel: This goes without saying – qualitative content writing is very important. Users do not have much time or willpower to go through low-quality content. Your content should hit the pain point of the users directly and offer them solutions for it.
• Content Style: The urge to aesthetically walk between a thin line of style and over-style is real. Choice of font type and size matters. But overdoing anything makes the content look melodramatic. Use the right size, font, color, and text type.
• Maximize Your Content Shareability: The best practice is to go parallel with trending practices. Content that is easily shareable on various platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other platforms encourages users to engage more.

Now that you know the factors that make your content usable, it’s time to know how to make it usable.

6 Best Practices for Content Usability and Conversions You Must Know

According to the CWsites reports, 95% of users do not read 80% of your content⁽ⁱ⁾.

With these statistics showing such user-behavior, how can you make sure people engage more with your content?

Let’s find out how you can do that by implementing some best practices we have listed below:

Adjust Your Content Strategy

Your content strategy should deliver the exact content that your users expect. Strategies like – which content piece should be prioritized more or less? Which content piece is likely to get more conversions? It takes time for your content pieces to start ranking but when it does, the sky’s the limit.

Follow Stephen King’s 10% Rule

The rule says – “your second draft = first draft – 10%”. After you complete your content, proofread it and then eliminate 10% from your content. This will make your content tighter and more concise.

Audience Research

Always start your content strategy with your audience research. It’s important to know your audience well. The content you deliver should meet their requirements. By doing this, you can develop a buyer persona that will increase conversions.

Keep it Concise

A large chunk of text is difficult to read. Instead, break them into relevant paragraphs or bullet points, if required. Your content should appear as a conversation between a writer and a reader. By breaking the text into short paragraphs and bullet points, it’s easy for them to recall it later.

Summarize the Content

After reading a long piece of information, it’s common for a human to forget most things. To make sure they remember everything, conclude the information in the end. This is a great way to cement the information you are providing. Make it short and crisp.

Use a Readable Font

Using fancy fonts can be good looking but if the user is unable to read the content, its fanciness doesn’t solve the purpose. A normal font style such as – Arial, Cosmic Sans, Trebuchet can be easy to read for the users.

Conclusion

When it comes to content creation, relevance and usefulness are vital. While reading your content, your audience must have faith in it. The key to creating usable content is to constantly test and explore the impact your content is creating on readers. The more effective ways you discover to develop your content, the more conversions you will receive.

If you are looking for some best practices to master your content creation, drop us a line at [email protected] and we’ll take it from there.

Statistics References:

⁽ⁱ⁾ UX Booth