Introduction
Comprehensible content makes a significant difference in how your audience reacts to your posts. If you are a content marketer, trying to reach out to more people, you should pay attention to readability.
Readability is a key performance indicator for online content, and it measures how easy it is to read an article. Depending on your product, service, or intent, readability can significantly affect how many people you reach.
Your content should be readable, skimmable, and understandable for your audience to engage with it.
Why is readability important for your online content?
If your content is too hard to read and filled with complex words and sentences, visitors might struggle to find meaning. But that’s not all. Other factors like content layout, fonts, and structure also play a part in improving how readable your content is.
While Google might not consider readability one of the key ranking factors, it is a crucial indirect factor. It is pivotal for marketers to focus on the metric along with other key SEO indicators.
Writing easy-to-read articles will enable your target audience to spend more time on your website. When the audience spends more time on your content and returns to them time and again, it indicates to the Google search engine that your content is valuable. This results in higher page rankings, bringing you more traffic in the long run.
Easy to read content is also more likely to convert visitors into customers, making it an indispensable part of conversion optimization.
How is readability measured?
Reading ease started a long time back in the 1940s before the internet existed. The most popular readability metrics used on the internet are the Flesch Reading Ease Readability formula and the Flesch-Kincaid readability tests.
The Flesch Reading Ease is measured between 1 and 100. A readability score between 70 and 80 corresponds with grade 8 level and can easily be read by an adult. Writers have to focus on smaller sentences with easier words to score higher on this reading scale.
Similarly, the Flesch-Kincaid readability tests identify how difficult it is to understand a particular article. While they use word length and sentence length just like the Reading Ease tests, the weightage to each indicator is set differently. This test is also measured between 0 and 100, with higher scores meaning easier to read.
Best Practices to Improve your readability
Here are a few tips that might help you write more readable content:
Write for your audience
Your blog readability should be aimed at your audience. To optimize it, you must first have a fair understanding of what kind of audience your product, service, or writing is attracting. If you are a business blogger, your writing should focus on value proposition in the simplest way to hook and convert your online traffic.
Leverage AI-Powered Blogging platforms
With the advent of AI technology, you can now use blogging platforms that automatically optimize your content’s readability to a 95+ score. This way, you only have to focus on creating engaging content and not worry about SEO and other things.
Use a conversational tone
Using conversational language can improve your readability scores significantly. However, must not use spoken fillers like ums and uhs, unless you are writing informally.
An easy way to adopt a more colloquial tone is to imagine that you are sharing a story with your friend.
Simplicity is key
One might think that using complicated, uncommon words and long sentences might establish you as a knowledgeable writer or brand. Contrary to that, the simpler your content, the more your audience will be able to engage with your content. Focus on the value you are providing and not English. Limit your paragraph size to 3-4 sentences and your sentence length short.
While you are breaking your content into shorter paragraphs, try and structure it in a way that you include H2 or H3 subheadings at short and regular intervals. This improves the readability and clarity of your content and keeps your readers hooked.
Use active voice
When you write more in an active voice, your content becomes easier for the audience to engage with. Active voice also helps you keep your sentences short and precise to ensure that you do not have a low readability score.
Structure it well
Photo by Bram Naus on Unsplash
Well-structured content looks more attractive and readable. Divide your blog into sections and use headers to guide the reader through each of them. When you have defined parts in your blog, it becomes easier for readers to skim through parts and focus on ones that add value for them.
Keep your paragraphs short, each dealing with a point with no more than three or four sentences.
Finally
Follow these readability improvement guidelines and leverage Superblog to publish your blogs to ensure that your readability is always optimized. Spend your time writing, not fixing, is our mantra! Talk to us today.
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