If you’re interested in blogging best practices, focus on using subheads in your posts. Why? People don’t read anymore. Well, I take that back—let’s just say people don’t read like they used to. With so much content coming at us from all directions, most of us read less, scan more. And that’s why optimized subheads are a becoming a critical component of blog posts.
How People Read
Before we talk about the art of subheads, let’s take a quick look at how reading habits have shifted. Jakob Nielsen (and I’ll confess, I’m an unabashed fangirl of Jakob’s big brain) analyzed a study by Harald Weinrich, Hartmut Obendorf, Eelco Herder and Matthias Mayer, “Not Quite The Average: An Empirical Study of Web Use” and discovered the following conclusions:
- When you add more copy to a page, people only read 18% of it.
- On an average site visit, people read half the information only on pages with 111 words or less.
- In addition to reading content, people study page layout, navigation and images.
- A user will read about 20% of the text on an average page.
The Internet is a noisy place—and that means people are juggling a number of distractions when they reach your content. The solution? Subheads.
Use Subheads To Tell (Part Of) The Story
There’s no way someone is going to glean the complete essence of a blog post or article just from the subheads. Yet if you carefully craft these natural dividers, someone can still get a sense of the piece from your headline and subheads—and that information should be compelling enough to encourage them to keep reading.
What’s more, subheads carry some SEO weight, too. You might be tempted to sneak in a clever pun or a pop culture reference in that subhead, but try and resist the temptation. Instead, use that valuable real estate to create a brief phrase that not only tells the reader what’s ahead—include keywords, too, which help optimize your content and make it more discoverable.
Even if someone doesn’t stick around to read the full piece, providing subheads gives them enough contextual clues to satisfy their curiosity—and if they discover information they find entertaining or helpful, they’re more likely to return to your site for more, share your link, save your page to read later or curate your content.
Subheads Give Readers a Break
One thing bloggers regularly struggle with is writing posts that are long enough to deliver value but short enough that readers don’t have to hit the snooze button while reading. Our best practices advice is that blogs should be no less than 300 words and no more than 500-600 in length. Anything more than that requires a commitment of your readers that they are often either not willing or not able to make. Especially if you’re writing pieces that are stretching the limits of recommended post length, adding subheads will help your readers hang in longer and serve to break up (both visually and contextually) the content into those proverbial bite-sized pieces that help readers get what it is they’re looking for from your content.
Subheads: Helping You Serve Your Audience
We optimize our websites for mobile visitors. We use data and analytics to drive our content and social networking strategy. As mentioned in the paragraph above, think of subheads as another optimization tool designed to make your content more visible and more readable, even for those who don’t have time (or the attention span) to finish the full piece. A successful strategy is all about serving your audience and customers—and if stats show that they’re not reading content like they used to, it’s time to adapt and deliver information in ways that make sense for your readers.
What do you think? Do you read by scanning like I do or am I totally off base?
Image: break.things via Compfight cc
Shelly Kramer is a Principal Analyst and Founding Partner at Futurum Research. A serial entrepreneur with a technology centric focus, she has worked alongside some of the world’s largest brands to embrace disruption and spur innovation, understand and address the realities of the connected customer, and help navigate the process of digital transformation. She brings 20 years’ experience as a brand strategist to her work at Futurum, and has deep experience helping global companies with marketing challenges, GTM strategies, messaging develoment, and driving strategy and digital transformation for B2B brands across multiple verticals. Shelly’s coverage areas include Collaboration/CX/SaaS, platforms, ESG, and Cybersecurity, as well as topics and trends related to the Future of Work, the transformation of the workplace and how people and technology are driving that transformation. A transplanted New Yorker, she has learned to love life in the Midwest, and has firsthand experience that some of the most innovative minds and most successful companies in the world also happen to live in “flyover country.”
