Above-the-Fold Optimization

Did You Know? You have just 8 seconds, on average, to capture a visitor’s attention before they move on to the next shiny object. (Source)

Happy Monday, Marketers!

As your work week gets underway, I thought it would be a good time to look at how marketers spend their precious hours.

Because there are many different roles under the larger “marketing” umbrella, I decided to choose one to keep our focus narrow for today’s 5-minute email — content marketing.

In June 2022, Ercule.co asked content marketers what they thought were the “most important jobs you do in your professional role.” Respondents could pick up to 4 of the provided 14 tasks, which I categorized in one of 3 ways:

• Tasks related to developing new content

• Tasks related to optimizing existing content

• Other or unspecified tasks

These were the results:

Nothing too shocking there to me:

• “Write new content” was the overwhelming winner with 63% of respondents highlighting it as one of the most important tasks.

• The top 4 tasks all fell in the “develop new content” bucket.

• The 3 tasks related to “optimizing existing content” maxed out at just 25% (and “Monitor/report on analytics” only loosely fits in that category”).

• Only 13% of content marketers believe one of their most important tasks is to “Improve blog/article conversion rates.”

While those results aren’t shocking, they aren’t how I’d spend my time.

An article published by Search Engine Journal stated “you should dedicate about half of your SEO efforts to updating old content, and the other half to creating new content.“

Given the cost of creating new content—think about how much time and/or money you invest in a single article, video, etc.—I wholeheartedly agree.

It’s often estimated that it’s 5x more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing customer. While I don’t have the exact number for creating new content vs. optimizing existing content, I can’t help but think that same trend holds true.

That leads us to the main topic for today’s edition of Data-Driven Marketing…

Above-the-fold optimization

On average, you have 8 seconds to capture your reader’s interest before they move on to the next shiny object. The average adult reads about 238 words per minute, which means your reader only consumes an average of 31 words of content before deciding whether it’s worth their time. That’s just 2 sentences!

Admittedly, I’m playing a little fast and loose with those estimates, because there’s a lot more to content than just words on the page, but you get the idea.

You need to hook ‘em hard and hook ‘em fast.

That’s why it’s critical you dedicate time to optimizing your above-the-fold content: the stuff that’s visible on a reader’s screen without scrolling.

But that leads to another dilemma for marketers: screens vary by size.

Mobile has already overtaken desktop as the primary way in which people consume digital content, with mobile traffic making up 61.2% of all web traffic, and that makes above-the-fold optimization all the more difficult (and important) because there’s far less real estate available on the compact screen of the typical mobile device.

Aside: It’s important to note that mobile vs. desktop viewership varies by niche. Many B2B brands may see a larger percentage of their traffic on desktop, because they’re marketing to people working on their office computers. Other industries may observe the opposite.

A study by Nielsen Norman Group (a UX firm) revealed that mobile web visitors spend 57% of their time on the first screen, 17% on the second screen (one full scroll down), and 26% on all remaining screens.

For context, content that appears above the fold on a 30” desktop monitor might require up to 5 full mobile screens to be displayed.

We’ve established the importance of grabbing your visitor with the very first content they see, so how do you do that?

First, it’s helpful to understand how your visitors are consuming your content. There have been many studies conducted to understand how users interact with content, and every study I’ve ever seen has concluded that people consume content in an F-shaped pattern.

Unsurprisingly, it’s the top, left, and center portions of the page that attract the most attention. Diving even deeper, 68% of visitor time is spent on the top half of the page and 86% on the top two-thirds.

If 57% of mobile visitor time is spent on the first screen, that means 39% of their time is spent on the top half of the first screen and 49% is spent on the top two-thirds of the first screen.

Above-the-fold optimization doesn’t just mean optimizing your content for conversions

Visitors can’t consume your content unless they find it. For many content marketing campaigns, that means getting found in Google. And guess what? These same behavioral patterns apply to search engine results, too.

Because you have limited time and/or money to invest in your content marketing efforts, you probably want to invest those resources where you’ll get the biggest bang for your buck. When optimizing your existing content for search engine results page (SERP) performance, usually that means focusing on keywords where your content ranks on the bottom half of page 1 or on page 2 in the SERPs.

Any of the myriad keyword tracking tools are great for monitoring SERP positions for your target keywords, quickly letting you identify the keywords with the largest opportunity, but there’s no better source than your free performance reports available in Google Search Console. There, you can look at all keywords your page is ranking for—not just the ones you’ve chosen to monitor in your tracking tool of choice.

As you decide where to spend your valuable time this week, consider where you’ll get the highest ROI for your time spent. There’s a good chance that time will best be spent optimizing your page either for improved UX, leading to increased conversion rates, or SERP position, leading to increased traffic.

Everyone say, “Hi!” to Christopher F. 👋

Question: Would you rather be able to talk to animals (but they all complain about their day) or be able to speak every language (but only be able to talk about the weather)?

Christopher F’s Answer: “I would rather be able to speak every language and only be able to talk about the weather because my dog sits in my office all day and it would get annoying listening to them whine about me not playing with them.”

Oh man, can I relate.

ChatGPT-Generated Joke of the Day 🤣

Why did the scarecrow win an award?

Because he was outstanding in his field.

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