3 Psychological Tips to Boost Your Business Web Site (Part 2 of 3)

Welcome to part two of this three part series on the three most commonly unknown psychological tricks to increasing your conversion and interaction rates on your business web site.

In my last post, we discussed the Psychology of Color.  Where you were taught what colors were effective and what ages these people prefer them.  If you haven’t read it, check it out!

This next psychological trick to boosting your business web site is one that can greatly make or break a site.  Industries have evolved around this concept.  People spend years trying to master it.  Only few can truly say they have succeeded.

I am talking about copy.  The voice of your web site.  The idea that explains who you are, and what you can do for your customer.

Let’s explain.

The Psychology of Copy

Most people think that in order to gain a readers respect and trust and eventually make a sale, they need to write in a formal manner.  They make sure to correct all their contractions, changing words with better thesaurus replacements, and use deep and lengthy sentences.  A piece of copy that a college professor would be proud of.

The truth is the average American education level is 5^th grade.   So unless you’re selling to a sophisticated target market, most of your web site users are not looking to read sophisticated wording. They want to be told the benefits and where to buy.  Trying to be too fancy with your wording won’t impress your reader, it will confuse them.

Dr. Rudolph Flesch talks about this point further in his book, The Art of Plain Talk. Here he creates his Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES) which, based on a 1 to 100 scale, rates the reading easiness of your copy. The higher your score, the easier your copy is to read.

The Flesch Reading Ease Score is calculated in a 5 step process as follows:

1)     Count every word, number, and symbol in your copy.

2)     Count all the syllables in the words, numbers, and symbols as you would pronounce them.

3)     Count every sentence that is separated by a period, question mark, semicolon, colon, exclamation point, or dash.

4)     Divide the total number of syllables by the total number of words.

5)     Divide the number of words by the number of sentences.

The result of your answer is your readability score.  If your score is 70 or above, your copy is in a good readability range.  In order to be truly effective as well, you should keep your sentences at around 11 words.

So when looking at your site, are you selling your product, or just telling about your product?