A few stats:

• “50 percent of potential website sales are lost due to the fact that visitors cannot locate the content that they need.” (Source: OMMA)
• “79 percent of Web users scan rather than read.” (Source: The Pew)
• The typical web surfer spends an average of just 56 seconds on a website and completes about 4 actions. A key element of site conversion is to make a website as relevant as possible and make the call-to-action super-clear.
• You have about 3 seconds to get a visitor's attention and keep them on a page before they "bail".

I love to read Jakob Nielsen's research on web utilization. Since the 1990's he has produced more valuable research, backed up by actual data, on how visitors to websites respond to web pages. He has been beating the "50% copy drum" from the time he began producing web research. He is probably best know for the "F-map" that shows that web browsers read web pages in an F-pattern, scanning the page for keywords and calls-to-action and largely ignore the rest of the content on a page.


We all feel the need to *tell our story* on the web. But do our visitors really care? If you're running an e-Comm site, you need to know how quickly you can lose a sale by not getting right to the point and using less copy to deliver your message.  

So put your web copy on a diet: Use strong keyword phrases. Do some research on how and what visitors are searching for on your site and adjust your copy accordingly. This isn't rocket science (though it doesn't hurt to have a thermal imaging eye-tracker thingy).