10 Seconds or Less to Impress: Is Your Website Doing the Job?

A curious characteristic of humanity is the predilection to become less patient as life gets more convenient. That tendency means your website has to immediately capture audience attention.

The average visitor will only scan an unknown website for 10 seconds or less.  That’s how long you have to spell out a benefit the visitor wants or needs.  It’s equally important to realize the rule applies to every page on the site, because visitors don’t always come in the front door.  The above factors make the presence of a marketing communications professional an indispensable asset for a web development team.

As a former Webby Award reviewer, I know the vast majority of sites don’t communicate a value statement for the prospective customer within the allotted time.  Worse yet, some never get to the point at all.  The primary reason for this sad state of affairs is the absence of experienced writers with marketing communications expertise.

The majority of a website’s communicative value is in the written word, but for some inexplicable reason, the technological generation has overlooked the importance of using it to capture audience attention.  The implicit assumption seems to be that the medium itself is sufficient to make people read the content, but the statistics do not bear out that hypothesis.  

Lately, there has been an overriding interest in manipulating words to draw traffic with search engine optimization, but that’s only half the job.  If a crowd comes to the store, but no one stays long enough to get to the cash register, has the merchant succeeded?  Of course not.

Writers know how to get the prospect to the cash register, and it’s called “WIIFM.”

WIIFM is an acronym for “What’s in it for me?”  The answer to that question is always found in benefits, and those benefits have to be front and center in order to be related within the first 10 seconds of a visit.  Websites that waste precious time on mission statements or features of the company or product leave it to the visitor to infer what’s in it for them to stay.  Guess what?  They don’t.

Every single page of website copy has to grab the visitor’s attention with something that fulfills his or her want or need.  This concept is as valid for informational sites as it is for commercial sites.  The reader has to be convinced your page has what he or she is looking for or they’ll move on, because in most cases they have at least a million other sites to choose from.  It’s as simple as that.

If you’re about to build a site, find out who’s writing the copy on the web development team and the level of experience that person has in marketing writing.  Experience limited exclusively to the Internet probably isn’t a good qualification unless the person has written for successful sites such as QVC or other retailing sites that live or die on their ability to tell the customer what they want and need to know.  

Above all, remember that a website is never about the company.  It’s about the prospects or visitors the site is trying to attract.  An experienced marketing writer understands that and uses the audience demographic and psychographic data to develop strategies that entice the audience to stay and return often.