Readability
6 Ways Improving Readability Benefits SEO
Highly readable content can benefit the audience and improve engagement. Discover six top ways that boosting the readability of your content can benefit your SEO strategy.
Improving readability means making your content easier for a wide range of customers to read, understand, and engage with.
While addressing the readability of content does not directly correlate to search engine rankings, the factors that make strong content more readable create a better user experience.
When highly readable content benefits the audience and improves engagement, it can be helpful for SEO, especially considering that Google prioritizes people-first content.
Discover six top ways that boosting the readability of your content can benefit your SEO strategy.
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According to Search Engine Journal, there isn’t a direct correlation between readability scores, such as with the Flesch Reading Ease and search engine rankings in Google. The article notes that in 2018, the Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google stated reading levels are important for the audience, but not a direct focus for SEO.
Readability is one of the many factors in having high-quality content that engages readers, provides helpful information, and gives insightful analysis.
So, it is an important consideration as you work to create the kind of content that ranks well, which is reliable, informative people-first content.
Google defines “helpful, reliable, people-first content,” as information primarily created to benefit people, not boost search engine rankings.
In other words, the best way to optimize is to help people with the content you create.
While this kind of helpful content needs to be comprehensive, insightful, original, and well-produced, it also stands to reason that it should be readable and accessible to the audience.
The basic tenets of good readability benefit a reader’s experience by eliminating the factors that make content difficult to understand:
What precedes these factors in importance is knowing your audience. Then, you can gauge your content’s readability accordingly.
For instance, if a brand sells electric scooters to teenagers, the best vocabulary and reading level for content will differ from a brand that provides high-tech medical equipment to hospital executives.
Learn more about writing for readability and discover examples of how readability improves content marketing.
While the relationship between readability and SEO is indirect, addressing readability has positives that can benefit SEO.
Increased usefulness is at the heart of people-first content and a significant by-product of readability.
As content marketers, the primary goal is to attract customers through valuable, relevant, and engaging content. Doing so satisfies readers and raises brand awareness, which can in turn, positively impact search engine rankings.
When content is highly readable and accessible, readers tend to spend more time with it. High engagement indicates that people are finding your content helpful and valuable (you can measure it with metrics like time on page). These characteristics also signal to search engines that this content benefits its readers.
When good content is accessible to engage with and enjoy, readers are more likely to share and spread the word about what they found. Content shareability increases visibility and traffic, which, in turn, boosts SEO.
Readable content makes it easier for readers to find what they want.
Whether a customer is seeking information by reading an article or making a buying decision by exploring e-commerce content, providing digestible content that is well-organized and delivered clearly goes a long way toward a happy reader and satisfied customer.
When readers spend more time with your content and engage with it, the activity can positively impact metrics that encourage other sites to link to it.
High-quality content with great user experience tends to have lower bounce rates and higher average engagement times. In turn, more sites may link to your content, raising the authority of your site.
One of Google’s criteria for people-first content is that it is well-written, neat copy that doesn’t appear hastily produced. In fact, Google states that when reviewing content you should ask the question, “Is the content produced well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?”
As a content writer, when you take care to ensure your content is highly readable and clearly formatted, you are checking this box for search engines.
There is no one easy shortcut to SEO. But if you are producing helpful, authoritative, people-first content that is thorough, well-researched and well-presented, you are on your way to creating messaging that resonates with readers and search engines. Checking readability can only add to the other positive aspects of your content.
Looking for more information on readability? Check out our top guides: