Your blog is an important tool for publishing your best content, engaging your readers and landing new clients. When people visit your blog, they decide whether to stay on or leave within the first few seconds.
Will they stay or leave? Will they read your content, become a reader and maybe a client? It depends on whether your blog is user friendly or not.
Here are 3 ways to ensure your blog is user friendly.
#1 Create evergreen content
The Internet advances at a fast pace. It is not a good user experience when your reader invest his time and attention to read your content and then find out it’s outdated. So create some content that are relevant today and many years to come.
First, if you can remove information about the dates your posts were published, do so. If you must have a date on your posts, use the date the content was last updated, not the date it was originally published.
Second, write posts that will still be relevant and factual in the future. Review your blog archives once in a while and update any post that’s become outdated with latest facts, insights and statistics.
#2 Use a mobile responsive design
Beginning from April 21, 2015, Google now uses mobile responsiveness as an important ranking factor. Is your site mobile friendly? Use this free Google tool to test it and see.
If your site is not mobile friendly, your mobile readers will have to zoom in and then repeatedly scroll left and right to read your content. That’s a bad user experience.
Many people now browse the internet on their phones and tablets. So if you don’t have a blog that‘s easy for mobile users to consume and interact with, they won’t stick around for long., and you’ll lose your search engine traffic to your competitor whose site is mobile friendly.
The good news is, this is easy to do. You can do that by using a responsive theme or web design. Alternatively, you can adopt dynamic serving or separate URLs for mobile users. Check this guide by Google for details.
#3 Use simple explanatory navigation
It is important that your blog should have clearly named menus. On this blog, Blogger Daily, you’ll see simple and easy-to-identify menus like “home,” “about,” “products,” “tips,” “contact,” “archives,” etc. That is user friendly.
It will not be great to name your contact page in the menu as “track me down now” because that is not very helpful to readers. It is also unnecessarily long.
Aside the menus, you should also make sure important elements like your blog logo, search box, comment box, breadcrumbs and posts categories are present on your blog and are easy for your readers to locate. That way, new readers can quickly find their way around your blog.
Also, make sure your blog logo is clickable and it leads back to your homepage. That way, your blog visitor will not have to continuously press the “Back” button or edit the URL in their browser before getting to your homepage.
With these suggestions, you can have a blog that is user friendly and that converts readers into subscribers and clients. So go ahead and implement them.
In what other ways can you make your blog more friendly to users? Please share in the comments.
