The Importance Of Readability In SEO

Most bloggers are all about optimizing their keyword density, meta tags, alt tags, and  other on-page SEO

But in the meantime, they tend to forget to write for humans

Many Bloggers believe that when they write in a more complex manner, they will be more acknowledged. But that is not always the truth.

The first, and likely most essential thing you need to consider when writing your content is to think 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. It might not live up to it’s full potential

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.

It’s like using a MOd version of a game rather than the original apk.

So, for instance, if you wanna play dream league soccer. Rather than using the original apk, you use the Dream league soccer MOD apk to get a headstart in the game with perks and benefits which the player from original apk doesn’t have.

Readability is the same.

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)

Calculate Readability Levels

According to the Reading Ease formula, there is a score between 1 and 100.

Then A conversion table is used to interpret this score.

For example, a score of 70-80 is equivalent to school grade level 7 and should be fairly easy for the average adult to read.

How to Check Your Readability?

There are several ways to check your blog/article readability score

1. webfx (Freemium)

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
  

2.Yoast (Freemium)

Everybody knows this. It’s no brainer

Yoast also has their readability checker for your every post.

They even provide suggestion to solve that issue

However, Yoast handles your content, but there are other parts of readability to consider as well.

3. Online-Utility Document Readability Calculator (Freemium)

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

4. Another way to check this is to use the algorithm of the Flesch-Kincaid readability score:

What Is Its Impact On My SEO?

There are a lot of reasons why you should make your content more easy 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 adequate. 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 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 wanna dominate the voice search, then you gotta have a short straightforward answer, FAQ Pages, schema markup and what not.

If your article is terrible to read, 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

In a nutshell, 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 have a direct influence but 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.

How are your reading scores? Share them below in the comments!