10 Content design mistakes that lower engagement — and how to fix them

…or worse, not using one at all. The top of your page — the space ‘above the fold ’ — is a reader’s first impression of your article. Do you want that first impression to be a dull, outdated stock image that doesn’t connect to the content, or worse, a boring block of text?

A cover image isn’t just there to make your article look nice — it’s also proven to increase engagement. Researchers D.Lagun and M.Lalmas at the ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, shared that they found “users tend to stay almost twice as long at the first screen when the article starts with an image, compared to articles without an image on top.”

In other words… you can nearly double your engagement, simply by choosing a relevant and visually engaging cover image. In a world where bad stock photography is taking over the internet, you have to be picky — it’s worth the time investment — so make sure someone with a good eye is choosing your media.

If you’re only using an image at the top of your article, it’s not good enough. Too few visual elements is another surefire way to lose readers to that ‘block of text’ syndrome.

Researchers at BuzzSumo — a company with tools for researching and monitoring the popularity of content — studied over one million articles and found that articles with visuals every 75-100 words received twice as many social shares as those with fewer. (If they like your article enough to share, they’re probably pretty engaged.)

Mix it up to keep your reader from starting to tune out your images — for instance, include some small graphics to illustrate a bulleted list in one section, then an immersive, full-width image to drive home a big point, later down the page.

Plus, Buffer shared that the brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than it does text, so what better way to keep scanners engaged than peppering your article with relevant imagery?

Yes, we’d all love it if everyone read every single word of our articles. But that’s just not the reality. The Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g) — world leaders in research-based user experience design — observed more than 300 people use hundreds of different websites, and found that most people scan content and make quick appraisals before reading, or moving to the next best thing. Specifically, “In sometimes less than a second, a user can complete an initial appraisal of a page, estimating the nature, quality, importance, and potential value to them.”

If your article has no hierarchy, no headings, or a confusing inconsistent layout, you’re basically burying the lead. Make it easy for readers to quickly scan through your article and see the value they’ll get, so they want to stick around and learn more, or easily find what they’re looking for and be inspired to engage more deeply.

If your data is getting lost in your articles, you’re also likely losing your readers too.

NN/g found that your eyes often scan for (whether consciously or unconsciously) numbers. Whether it’s because you’re looking for information, or simply because the shape of numerals stands out in text, they’ve been shown to draw the eye and keep your readers engaged.

So lean into that fact and create visual elements from the data in your article. This will not only help to break up your text, but also highlight some of the information that’s most likely to catch your reader’s eye. If you have the datasets and design team to support it, data visualizations are a powerful way to draw readers in and quickly convey information.

If you don’t have the time for something that sophisticated, simply pulling out a data highlight (basically a piece of data stylized as its own content block in a larger font, kind of like a pull quote), can do a similar job.

What’s another way to keep readers moving through your article? Have the article move while they scroll.

This is definitely a pro tip, but including features like parallax scrolling or animations as you move down the page can catch your reader’s attention as they move through your article.

According to Katie Sherwin at NN/g, “The velocity of motion is a preattentive trait: an object that moves at different speed than everything else in a scene stands out like a cheetah sprinting through open grasslands; people will notice it without making any explicit effort to search for it.”

That said, you do have to be cautious with features like this — if it’s not implemented correctly, they can cause usability issues. But added into your content with care, they can really help draw a reader through the content.

Of course, the ultimate goal is to get your reader to take some kind of action — like reading another article, subscribing, or even purchasing one of your products. While you can gain reader trust and interest through content, you also need to guide them towards the action you’re hoping they’ll take, by including call-to-actions (CTAs).

Many content designers don’t want to be too salesy, so they try to keep the CTAs subtle, by making them look natural within the content or placing them at the bottom. But if an article is full of eye-catching images, animations, pull-quotes, data visualizations, and more, a subtle CTA is going to get overlooked.

While you may want your CTAs to feel natural, you also want them to be obvious. Hubspot has found that “text-based CTAs within blog posts convert better”. Generally, this text CTA is within the top third of the post, and then accompanied by a separate CTA at the bottom. This pairing has dramatically increased conversions from blog content.”

You’ll also ideally want to put the CTAsat a place within the content where the reader is feeling the most engaged or getting the most value. For instance, maybe after you give a really good tip about CTAs, you invite users to enter their email to download a free tool to help their conversion rates.