If I have all the information you need in the content but start with the hard words that you won’t even understand, would you read it further?
The answer is simple – “NO”.
That’s what content readability is all about. You can give the needed information to the reader but that’s not enough, you have to give it in the easiest way possible.
Nowadays, when SEOs look up hundreds of factors to make the website rank, they are missing the basics of it.
” The Content Readability “
It’s as important as having content on a web page.
Tighten your seat belts because we’re going to dig into them to know why you need to improve readability, does it affect the SEO, how you can check it and at endways to improve the content readability.
Let’s Start!
How Readability Affects Your SEO?
The readability of the content is so much ignored while writing blogs or articles that many of the new writers don’t even know about it. Content Writers/ Marketers will fix everything for example keyword stuffing, meta tags, image alt tags, structuring and hundreds of on-page SEO but they won’t even think about the readability once before publishing.
Well yes, one of the major reasons can be that Google’s search ranking algorithm does not account for that as a ranking factor or to say a direct ranking factor. But content readability does actually impacts the SEO of the website and is one of the indirect ranking factors of Google.
Content Readability
Content readability is the score of how easy the written text is to understand.
The article that is easier to understand has higher content readability.
How To Measure The Content Readability?
To measure the content readability by science depends on the factors such as:-
- Speed of perception
- Visibility
- Rate of work (e.g., reading speed)
- Perceptibility in peripheral vision
- Perceptibility at a distance
- Eye movements
- Fatigue in reading
- Reflex blink technique
So, to normally measure the content readability, writers came up with a method, where they estimate the grade of a student who can understand the written text. After the survey, it was found that an average human can read a grade 9 text, but to be more readable it is suggested to write content for a grade 7 student.
Why Should You Make Your Content Readable When It’s Not A Direct Ranking Factor?
To think, even when the readability of the content is not what Google looks for directly. Still, there are a number of valid reasons why you should take readability seriously.
The most important one is that search engines do look at the human behaviour on a page. And improving the content readability is equal to telling Google that people like your content (of course there are other factors too like content relevancy).
Optimizing your content for better readability will improve the page’s bounce rate, exit time, time-on-page and social signals, which will be enough to tell Google that your content is worth it.
You can notice yourself, you won’t read a page if you don’t get (or found it hard to get) its first paragraph.
People come online to get information most easily, they won’t spend time reading hard content, they want it fast and simple. And that’s the writer’s job to serve the information in the simplest way possible.
When your content has good readability, the readers will stay on the page to read and know more about the topic as they’re having no issues reading through it. Which will result in decreasing the bounce rate and improving the SEO.
Now It’s Must To Know,
How To Check The Readability Of The Content?
Now if you don’t have an editor to review the content, you can simply ask a friend or a family member to simply review your content’s readability. A third person can help you get an unbiased review.
Other than that, there are also a few scales that can evaluate the readability of your content by going through your written content:
The Flesch Reading Ease score gives you a number between 0 to 100, depending on the readability of the content with 100 being the most readable. A study by Harvard states that one should aim for a score between 60-70 for an adult readership.
The Flesch-Kincaid Reading Grade is the reading level of your content based on what grade students will be able to read through it easily. Whereas readable.io suggests aiming for grade 8 or below to make sure that your content is readable to more than 70 per cent of the internet users.
We picked out some helpful tools that can determine the readability score to let you know:
Hemingwayapp.com: Hemingway app is a free web app (except for some premium features). The tool can be much useful to writers who usually tend to use complex words and sentence structures. It reads through your content and gives you a score for that, also it highlights all the issue areas so that you know what you have to fix.
Yoast: Yoast is already a quote famous WordPress plugin for SEO. It also has a feature to determine the readability of the content. It gives you a number based on Flesch Reading Ease score, measuring sentence length, use of passive voice, complex words and more.
Readable.io: This is a free web app that determines the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Grade Level and the Flesch Reading Ease score and some others too. It even measures the content for several text stats like reading time, the number of adjectives, characters per word, etc.
Grammarly: It can be used as an app or as a chrome extension. It’s quite easy and helpful as it checks all the grammar such as punctuation, spelling, style, word choice and offers good suggestions for improvement. Grammarly doesn’t measure the readability score specifically but it still improves the grammar and quality of content.
Ways To Improve The Content Readability
1. Short and Simple Words Do The Magic
The most direct way to improve your readability score. Just like Kevin said, “Why waste time saying a lot of words when fewer words do the trick”.
People that have come to you want information, they won’t like to know your vocabulary.
2. Short Sentences Are Perfect
Short sentences keep readers going continuously. If you have written a long sentence, you can simply break it into two.
3. Write As You Talk
This is a general guideline that shouldn’t be missed at any cost. You should write like you’re talking to the reader. Forget technical language, talk to the reader instead. It will keep the content simple and will be more interactive for the reader.
4. Look Of The Content
Apart from keeping it simple and conversational, the visual aspect of the content matters a lot too.
Typography is essential as it makes an impression on the reader. Typography factors that affect and should be looked at before publishing includes:
- Font
- Font Size (for headings and sub-headings)
- Line Height
- Line Length
5. Formatting
Hitting enter after every sentence ain’t much of a bad thing. Making short sentences and paragraphs are actually suggested as it makes the content looks open and good.
Use headers and subheaders often to divide your content. Usage of tables or bullet points is also suggested as it organizes the information and presents it beautifully to the reader.
6. Images
Images may not look like something related to content readability but that’s not the case.
Images can make the content look easy. They can break the continuity of the plain text, segment your content and can make it look interesting.
Studies say that the golden ratio of image to text is 1 image per 100 words.
Choosing a good image is important too, it must add value to your readers. The image should be relevant to the content, should make the information easier to understand or at least they should entertain the readers.
7. The Transition Words
Transition words like “similarly”, ” but”, “for example” and “in addition to” are quite useful.
These words keep the connectivity and make it easier for the reader to stick to it. They can be a wild card as they have the potential to provide a smooth reading experience.
The Bottom Line
Content Readability or basically the whole of Content Marketing is about the 3 principles:
- Keep the readers in the front seat of everything you do.
- Educate, inform or at least entertain your audience.
- Keep it simple (as much as possible).
Keeping things simple and straight might sound easy but it’s actually not. No need to panic about that, practice makes a human better. The more you stick to the basics, the more enjoyable your content becomes.
Thank you for reading along, it meant a lot to us.
I hope you have found all the answers you were looking for, if not! Then the comment box is wide open for you or you can mail ([email protected]) us, we promise you to reply as fast as possible.
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