In this chapter you will learn the difference between writing for print and writing for websites, and why you should never promise a three-legged man if you don’t have one.

There are three kinds of writing for the internet. There’s the writing you do for Google; the writing you do in an email; and the writing you do for social media. They have a lot in common, but there are some crucial differences too.

WRITING FOR GOOGLE

Let’s start with Google.

In the early days of internet search engines, search results were based on the words a page contained. That was perfectly sensible, because if you were looking for a book such as Fly Fishing by J.R. Hartley (1991), then a page containing the words ‘fly fishing’ and ‘JR Hartley’ was likely to be relevant. The more times the words appeared, the more relevant the page was likely to be.

Unfortunately, a lot of people soon realised that they could game the system. By stuffing their pages with popular but irrelevant keywords, they could make their sites appear in search results for those keywords.

It wasn’t quite as bad as this:

If Britney Spears had a driveway she’d buy her gravel from Gravel Direct, your one stop shop for all things gravel. Our gravel’s so good that when you’ve ordered from us once, you’ll soon be back saying Hit Me Baby One More Time, just like Britney Spears. And our gravel isn’t Toxic, like Britney Spears’ new single.

but it was still pretty bad.

Another tactic was to use relevant keywords, but to overuse them. Here is an example that Google uses to illustrate the problem:⁶

We sell custom cigar humidors. Our custom cigar humidors are handmade. If you’re thinking of buying a custom cigar humidor, please contact our custom cigar humidor specialists at [email protected].

If you’ve ever searched for products online, you’ll also be familiar with pages that do this:

Are you looking for Black Friday deals? If you’re looking for the best Black Friday deals you’ll find the best Black Friday deals right here. We look for the best Black Friday deals and put them on our best Black Friday deals page where you can find the best Black Friday deals on Black Friday. We find the best Black Friday deals on laptops and the best Black Friday deals on monitors, as well as the best Black Friday deals on accessories.

Don’t do that. Not only is it horrible to read – and likely to provoke fury if, after wading through it, the page doesn’t actually have the thing your reader is looking for – but Google now penalises any website that uses such tricks.

Google visibility matters, particularly in Europe where it has nearly 100 per cent market share for search. If Google doesn’t like your writing, searchers won’t see it. That won’t matter if you’re writing online content for people who already know who you are and who will seek out such content, but if you want to reach a wider audience you need to appease the Google gods.

Here’s how to do it.

SEO: HOW TO DO IT THE RIGHT WAY

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of writing in such a way that your page or pages turn up when people search for that particular topic, issue or product. It’s also a moving target, because whenever Google tightens up the rules to stop people gaming the system, people find new ways to game the system. The latest version of Google’s SEO documentation is online at www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf.

The specifics of SEO may change, but the basics don’t. If you want to rank highly in search engine results, you need to deliver what people are searching for without wasting their time.

Think of your own searches. What annoys you when you’re trying to find information or solve a problem? My list includes:

Search engines attempt to prioritise sites on the basis of accuracy, relevancy and trustworthiness. If your content meets all three criteria, it will naturally score highly in search results.

There are some technical considerations too. There are things Google prefers to see in the HTML code of web pages, such as accurate title tags, descriptive page addresses and short page summaries, but the most important bit of Google advice is much more straightforward:

Users know good content when they see it and will likely want to direct other users to it. This could be through blog posts, social media services, email, forums, or other means. Organic or word-of-mouth buzz is what helps build your site’s reputation with both users and Google, and it rarely comes without quality content.

As with other forms of business writing, your writing should be designed to do something. When you’re writing for an external audience that’s coming via search, you need to offer something useful. Most of the time, when people are searching they’re usually trying to solve a problem – a practical problem, or a lack of knowledge about something. For example, my most recent searches have been to look for refurbished laptops, to see if other people are having the same broadband issues as me and to work out how to change the clock in the car. If your writing isn’t designed to solve a problem, it might not need to be written in the first place.

The basic rules of writing apply just as much online, so brevity, simplicity and accuracy are essential. But there are some other online-only considerations. The most important one is that you should not try to trick your readers into visiting pages that are not relevant by making promises you can’t keep.

Another important tip is when you’re linking to something else: don’t just say ‘click here’. That’s useless to people using assistive technology such as screen reader software. If you’re linking to a report or a support document, say what it is in the link text. For similar reasons, don’t use images containing text when you could just use text.

TL;DR

There’s a famous acronym on the internet: tl;dr. It’s short for ‘too long; didn’t read’, and it sums up the way people read on the internet. If it doesn’t grab them quickly, they will move on to something else.

In a famous study by internet accessibility expert Jakob Nielsen back in 1997, researchers discovered that people don’t read web pages. They scan them, casting their eyes over them at high speed. When Nielsen’s team studied internet users, they found that 79 per cent always scanned web pages and just 16 per cent read word by word (Nielsen, 1997).

Nielsen’s research was carried out on desktop PC users. In 2016, the study was repeated for mobile devices. The key takeaway is that it’s harder to read on a phone than a PC. It slows down reading and reduces users’ ability to comprehend what they’re reading. In effect, a smartphone makes us less smart (Meyer, 2016).

If you’re writing for mobile, that means it’s important to simplify wherever you can. And whether you’re writing for mobile or desktop users, Nielsen’s advice is just as relevant today as it was in 1997. Always use:

These recommendations were tested for usability, which is based on multiple measurements including:

Halving the word count increased usability by 58 per cent. Presenting numbers as bulleted lists rather than a paragraph of text improved usability by 47 per cent. Using neutral rather than exaggerated, overhyped language improved usability by 27 per cent. And using all three techniques improved usability by 124 per cent.

WHAT TO DO ABOUT LONG DOCUMENTS

Some documents can’t be shortened without making them useless: a detailed proposal, an important case study, a procedures manual or an in-depth guide to a product simply don’t lend themselves to a handful of sentences. That leaves you with two choices: you can either provide the information as an embedded document, or you can break it up into shorter, more readable sections – either in newspaper-style formatting with sections divided up by sub-headings and images or other media, or into multiple separate pages.

Embedding is the easiest option: it’s just a matter of uploading the PDF or Word document to your site or a sharing service such as Dropbox and providing a link to it. It’s an approach best suited to lengthy documents for people using desktop PCs, laptops or tablets: PDFs in particular are a pain to read on smartphones.

As with writing for the internet, avoid unnecessary design clutter and focus on readability. Just because you don’t have to optimise it for the internet, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be optimised at all.

WRITING FOR EMAIL NEWSLETTERS

Many businesses like to send out email newsletters, and we’ve got some bad news about that: in the studies mentioned earlier in this chapter, Nielsen’s researchers found that people are even less patient with email than they are online.

That doesn’t mean that email doesn’t work. It does, and it’s a crucial marketing tool for many businesses – many of whom use dedicated email platforms such as MailChimp or Constant Contact to help them manage and monitor their campaigns – but emails need to be well designed, precision targeted and well written.

The most important thing to remember is that we are all absolutely drowning in email, and it’s getting worse. The average office worker receives 121 emails a day, and 47 per cent of those are spam.⁷

Email is increasingly mobile, too. In 2017, 66 per cent of email was read on mobile devices. On PCs and Macs, the click-through rate for marketing emails – that is, the percentage of people who click on the action link after reading the message – is 18 per cent. On mobile that falls to 13.7 per cent. Your email is more likely to be read if you send it on a Tuesday, and the ideal subject line is between 60 and 70 characters long.

As with writing for web pages and blogs, writing for email is all about getting your message across as quickly as possible. You have a very short window before the reader’s attention moves elsewhere, so you must fight the flab even more than you do in other forms of business writing.

There are a few useful things to consider with writing for emails:

The golden rule of writing for email is simple:

Don’t annoy your readers.

Email newsletters are not just a sales channel, and overly sales-y content will have the recipients reaching for the unsubscribe link.

A newsletter must provide value. That value could be in the form of useful industry insights, news of important technological breakthroughs, how-to advice, tips, industry-specific humour or photos of cats sitting on servers. Anything that’s useful or interesting to your readers, relevant to what they do and relevant to what your business does.

Once you have identified the content of your newsletter, the next step is to work on the pitch: how are you going to sell the idea of your newsletter so that your clients or potential clients happily click on the ‘Subscribe’ button?

There are two key sections to that. First of all, you need a good headline and strapline to urge the reader to subscribe. For example:

Get Cats on Servers – free every Friday!

You love cats. You love servers. Get cats on servers, fresh every Friday.

Second, you need to sell the content of your newsletter. Keep it short and punchy, for example:

A weekly email of the very funniest photos of cats on servers.

No dogs. No desktops. Just felines at home and the odd Cat6 cable.

Obviously, this proposed content is here for comedic effect, but we’ve made it abundantly clear what our newsletter contains and when it’s published. Your newsletter might be about industry news, or top tips for particular products, but remember to sell the sizzle, not the sausage.

SOMEONE INVENTED A NEW WAY TO GET READERS; YOU’LL NEVER GUESS WHAT HAPPENS NEXT!

One of the worst developments on the internet is the rise of clickbait, which is when an email, Twitter post, Facebook message or website headline promises some kind of astonishing information but won’t tell you what it is until you click through to see the article. That way, the website gets all-important page views and advertising views before the reader even knows what’s in the article.

The reason it’s so popular is because it works.

Clickbait takes advantage of something called a ‘curiosity gap’, which dates back to the days of movie matinees. In the golden days of cinema serials, cowboy films or other thrilling things would end with a cliffhanger – often literally, with the hero hanging off a cliff with no obvious means of escape. How could he possibly survive? Find out in the next episode!

The curiosity gap is why TV presenters say ‘find out after the break’ and why every single internet headline appears to follow the ‘Click here to discover the one simple trick that’ll make your business better’ template.

There’s nothing wrong with clickbait if you deliver what you promise. It’s when you don’t that readers get annoyed. As James Hamblin put it beautifully in an article for The Atlantic magazine (Hamblin, 2014), if you’re going to use a headline such as ‘This Three-Legged Man Is Not What You’re Thinking But Will Blow Your Mind. You Won’t Believe How Three-Legged He Is Until You Click. It’s a Real Third Leg, Not a Crutch, I Promise’, you had better deliver.

If you promise me a three-legged man, and I go into your Internet tent and there is a real three-legged man, then, fair enough. I have more questions and feel pity for this man and hope he’s fully on board with being paraded about like this, but apart from that, okay. If instead you reveal to me a man with a crutch, then I definitely hate you and feel no sympathy for your crutch-ed accomplice, even though he’s clearly injured. That kind of deception is obviously one way to get readers to call your article clickbait. Even if what you wrote is great, people will be upset if it under-delivers on the expectations set by the headline. If you promise me a three-legged man and I go into the tent and it’s a sword swallower, I’m upset, even if he’s really terrifyingly amazing and highly regarded in sword-swallowing circles.

Unfortunately, an awful lot of internet headlines promise a three-legged man and deliver a two-legged man with a crutch. It’s terribly short-term and self-defeating: you might get extra readers with such trickery, but those readers are not going to share your content or fall for it the next time you do it.

It’s all about keeping your promises. If you promise three tips that will truly transform a business, those tips had better be good ones the reader won’t already know. And if they are, that’s great. Your reader will be happy and may well share your message with other like-minded souls. But, like anything else in business, if you over-promise and under-deliver, you’re going to annoy people.

So how do you write a good headline? A headline should quickly answer three key questions:

A good headline does that in the most effective possible way.

Depending on who you’re writing for and what you’re writing about, you can use a variety of tricks to make your headlines work harder. For example:

KEY TAKEAWAYS

⁶ See https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66358?hl=en

⁷ See www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Email-Statistics-Report-2017-2021-Executive-Summary.pdf