Most bloggers are not aware that readability affects SEO (indirectly) and they optimizing their keyword density, meta tags, alt tags, and other on-page SEO. Many Bloggers believe that when they write in a more complex manner, they will be more acknowledged.
The first and most essential thing you need to consider when writing your content is thinking about your readers. The second is to guarantee that your reader gets the message you wanna convey. Remember that great content isn’t great unless it’s is read and analyzed or understood.
Even if your article is amazing, but if it’s so hard to read. No one likes to read terrible-looking content. People read online to get the data or information they need,
Since most people are busy nowadays, they want it the fastest and easiest way possible to get their information. and your job is to make all this information easily accessible to them.
What is Readability?
Content readability is the simplicity with which a reader can comprehend and easily read the text. In other words, the vocabulary, sentence structure, and its presentation (for example, typographic aspects like text dimension, font size height, and length of the line, etc.)
How to Check Your Readability?
There are several ways to check your blog/article readability score
Head over to their website and enter your URL. Next, click on Calculate readability
And you will get scores based on:
- Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease
- Flesch Kincaid Grade Level
- Gunning Fog Score
- SMOG Index
- Coleman Liau Index
- Automated Readability Index
They also display the text statistics based on
- No. of Sentences
- No. of words
- No. of complex words
- Percent of complex words
- Average words per sentence
- Average syllables per word
- Yoast
Everybody knows this. It’s a brainer. Yoast also has their readability checker for your every post. They even provide suggestions to solve that issue. However, Yoast handles your content, but there are other parts of readability to consider as well.
- Online-Utility Document Readability Calculator
This is another great way to check the score. You can either Copy Paste the text into the area or enter the URL which you wanna check
- Another way to check this is to use the algorithm of the Flesch-Kincaid readability score:
How does readability affect my SEO?
There are a lot of reasons why you should make your content easier to read. Despite the fact, your readability score doesn’t have any effect on your search engine Rankings. Most of the content on the web doesn’t have much readability score.
This implies that they are ranking on the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) however, as time goes by, it can really affect them.
I would say it is safer to go up to a keyword density of 2.5% but that 2% is more than sufficient. Simply keep your content relevant with easy to read and you will be fine.
Keep in mind, that as a blogger or a writer you’re making content for humans. Don’t only think about search engines alone. You just need to find the right balance between SEO and context.
After the Hummingbird Update, Google has become smarter at recognizing equivalent words (synonyms). It means that they knew what your content is about even without you telling them and stuffing a keyword into your content ended up being pointless.
Instead, it also makes it terrible and so hard to read.
If Google actively punishes sites or web pages indulging in these tactics, they are eventually gonna vanish or drop down like a dead stone from the SERPs.
As voice search is increasingly taking over the market slowly, the readability of your article is becoming a necessity more than ever.
If you want to dominate voice search, you'll have a short, straightforward FAQ page, schema markup, and whatnot.
If your article is terrible to read, the chances of your post being used as an excerpt are very low. Your text needs to be clean and clear with the right font size and color.
here are some ways to increase the readability of your article:
- Think before you write! Write for your audience
- Devise a structure for your blog post
- Use paragraphs
- Use Headings
- Use signal words
- Optimize the Colour and Images
- Optimize the length of your article
- Link to previous content.
CONCLUSION
At the end of the day, everything comes down to what you are writing about. Certain subjects will be more easily understood than others. Our job as a blogger or writer is to convey the information to the targetted people while abiding by the Search Engine rules.
Even though content readability doesn’t directly influence, it does affect your search rankings in one way or another. For example: If you have terrible readability, the users are eventually gonna leave your site. Which leads to a high bounce rate. Now that is a problem because according to the rank brain, site bounce rate is considered in ranking a factor.