You put a good deal of time and effort into your chiropractic website. For Search Engine Optimization, you include quality content about the benefits of chiropractic, information about the conditions you treat and the modalities you use. While adding regular and useful content to your site on a very regular basis may boost your SEO, new research has been released that suggests visitors to your site may not actually be reading your hard work, at least not in its entirety.
On the news site Slate, in an online article humorously titled, "You Won't Finish This Article," writer Farhad Manjoo outlined the data that shows that only a small fragment of the online-reader population is reading articles and blog posts through to the end.
Using real-time software, Manjoo and his colleagues tracked the portions of the pages each Web browser was viewing by the second. They observed where readers spent the most time, and they noted at what point readers left the page. They found that almost half of visitors to their website left an online article around the halfway mark. There were others who didn't even make it that far.
In fact, some Web users stop reading when they get to the end of the portion of the article "above the fold". In Web lingo, this means the part of your article's content where readers need to scroll in order to read more.
The data, which they presented with helpful graphs, also showed that many people tweet out or share links to articles they haven't fully read. They even found that some people comment about content without reading the entire piece first.
It is likely that the same thing is happening on your chiropractic site. Patients and prospects may be skimming over chunks of text, looking for materials that engage them faster than reading does. They might be refusing to scroll to read more. It is very possible that the majority are not reading the entirety of your content, and some may even be sharing what you've written without reading all of it.
What can you do to better engage visitors to your chiropractic website? Look at your content that is "above the fold". Do readers see more than just a picture and title; is there something there to hook them into staying on your page or scrolling to find out more? You might need to rethink the strategy of writing pages and pages of text. If you do the right things with keywords, they might help your SEO and getting people on your site, but if they're not being read, they're doing little to keep anyone there.
Now is the time to consider using video to engage your site's users in a more stimulating way. Although it is true that less people are reading content, it seems that more people are watching it. The technique of using video rather than words has been shown to convert curious website visitors into patients. We offer an extensive library of chiropractic videos, addressing many topics that your patients and prospects are looking for. Check out our Chiropractic Video Service today.
Reference
Manjoo F. You won't finish this article: why people online don't read to the end. Slate online; June 6, 2013. www.slate.com.
