Q4 Check in!

Hi all! We're a month into Q4 and it's more important than ever to make sure your site is as optimized as possible for this very important quarter of the year. Making the most out of Q4 is a great way to prepare for the inevitable slump of Q1 that most sites see in January once budgets really reset. 

So there's no time like the present to make sure you're set up for success! Of course, each site is unique so while all of these suggestions might not apply, I did want to hop in here with a few tips and post-Halloween tricks. 

• Check your font size! You typically want to have the body of your font anywhere between 18-20px. This is usually the sweet spot. It's large enough for your readers without being SO BIG that they scroll by too quickly. Make sure your Line Height is between 1.6-1.8px while you're at it. It helps balance your font size as well as make things a bit more legible. 
   
• Lengthen your content - but with intention! My font size suggestion above will help, but approach this holistically. Maybe elaborate a bit more, or consider adding in some beautiful high-quality photos to help keep people engaged. Journey's ad setup works best with long-form content because you're paid based on impressions rather than sessions/pageviews. Keeping your audience scrolling and participating in your content can help give performance a boost.
   
• Break up bigger paragraphs, especially for your mobile readers. Most readers are going to be on their phones and paragraphs over three sentences can be pretty daunting on a smaller screen. Keeping paragraphs to 1-3 sentences breaks up the content nicely, making it easy for a reader to absorb, and allowing a better balance for our ad script. 
   
• Set your Table of Contents to be collapsed by default. I'm not saying drop it entirely because it can be useful, but a lot of times I see a very long table of contents that takes up the entire first screenview. This can cause users to jump around on the page instead of reading through the content organically and miss several in-content ads. Collapsing your table of contents by default keeps it there for readers who want it, but not encouraging the ones who would otherwise ignore it.

If you make any of the above changes, always be sure to view your site from an incognito window on both your computer AND your mobile phone. You want to make sure you're seeing your site as if you're a new reader with fresh eyes. Even if you're not making any new changes, this is still generally good practice. 

Happy Blogging!