Improve Readability Because It Affects Your SEO

Table Of Contents

What does Readability mean?

Readability refers to how easily people can understand your content. If it is easy for people to read, they would get it easily and as a result, stay on your site for a longer time. If you improve readability, your site will rank higher in search results too.

A good readability score helps your SEO and ranks your content higher in search results.

Think about search engines. Why were they made? To answer people’s questions. So, naturally, if your content answers their question in the simplest way possible, it will favour you.

Hence, it is essential that you pay close attention to your site’s readability score.

A piece of content that has a low readability score is tougher for people to understand. They can read it still, but with a higher concentration level.

Using too many complex words can reduce your readability score.

What is Readability score?

A readability score is a number that denotes how easy or difficult the text is to read. 0 is the toughest and 100 is the easiest.

The most widely used readability measures are Flesch reading ease, Flesch-Kincaid grade level, Automated Readability Index, Coleman-Liau index and Gunning-Fog index. Each of them has a different formula or tests they conduct on a piece of content. For example, in Flesch reading score,

90-100 score means that the text can be understood by an average 11-year-old student

60-70 score means that the text can be understood by an average 13-15-year-old student

0-30 score means that it can be understood by university graduates.

Also Read: Check backlinks using these free/paid tools

Readability Formulas

Automated Readability Index: 4.71 x (characters/words) + 0.5 x (words/sentences) – 21.43

Flesch Kincaid Grade: 206.835 – 1.015 x (words/sentences) – 84.6 x (syllables/words)

Gunning Fog Score: 0.4 x ( (words/sentences) + 100 x (complex Words/words) )

Coleman Liau Index: 5.89 x (characters/words) – 0.3 x (sentences/words) – 15.8

The ideal score that you should aim for is 60 or higher. This score ensures that the content is easy to read for everyone who has had 8th-grade education.

Basic practices that improve readability

Keep it to the point

Don’t exaggerate. Write your content in a short and concise manner. People have a habit of skipping over extensively long articles.

Also Read: John Mueller, a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Answers The Burning Questions About SEO

Write short paragraphs

A long paragraph can overwhelm the reader and make them think it is too tough to follow. Write shorter paragraphs to let the reader take in the information slowly, at their own pace.

Use proper headings

Headings and subheadings make it easier for both the reader and search engines. They just need one glance to understand what you’re going to talk about in the coming paragraph.

Also, use the correct order of headings. H1, H2 etc, you know how the counting goes right? Headings affect your SEO indirectly. They make your content more easily scannable which is an important factor affecting SEO.

Easy to read fonts

Cursive fonts can be tempting. But they are too hard to understand if you are reading an entire paragraph. I suggest and I myself use Google fonts for the best readability. Check out the 20 best Google fonts for websites in this post.

Also Read: 6 Ways To Get Traffic From Specific Countries & Increase Your Adsense Earnings

Tools that can help you to improve readability of your site

Grammarly

Grammarly has a web app and a google chrome extension that you can install. When you have the extension installed, it will work on anything that you type online and help improve readability of it.

If you purchase the premium version of Grammarly it will suggest you better words to convey your message too. It is more about quality writing than SEO content.

Grammarly points out mistakes in grammar, spelling and also in the tone of the content.

You can set a goal for the content that you are writing and Grammarly will make recommendations according to that. The goals can be academic, business, technical, creative, and casual.

Check out Grammarly

Hemingway Editor

Hemingway offers a free online editor, which shows how easy/hard it is to read certain content. It has a Web app as well. The editor points out errors and suggests correct on the right panel, as shown in the picture above.

Check out Hemingway Editor

Also Read: 10 SEO Benefits of Internal Linking

Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress

Yoast is a free WordPress plugin that can be used to check the basic SEO of your content. In addition to this, it offers you a readability score as you’re drafting your content.

The readability report shows you details such as: