How to Improve the Readability of Your Content

While you start planning for website content, what factors you mustn’t forget to consider? Can writing high-quality, fresh and well-researched content suffice? Or, are there other things as well that require your equal attention? So, you should be well-armed with techniques to Improve the Readability of Your Content.

An important factor that every website owner overlooks while starting to build their content strategy plans is that they make a keen assessment of the readability elements of the proposed content. If your content is not readable, then it is a complete waste of time, resources, and energy, no matter how creatively it was written.

Content writers, bloggers and content marketers might try optimizing their chosen keyword density, keyword decorations, meta tags, meta descriptions, image alt tags, and several other on-page SEO activities. Ironically, they often overlook an important factor of content readability, which shouldn’t be ignored at any time.

Such laxness amongst them is because of this key factor that content readability isn’t mentioned directly in Google’s search ranking algorithm. Perhaps, a large chunk of webmasters and SEO professionals aren’t aware that content readability is one of the most important though indirect ranking factors. It indeed plays a pivotal role in helping websites get smooth search engine rankings.

What is Readability?

Readability is the ease with which a reader can read and understand written text. In a simple language, the readability of a text depends on its content quality and presentation.

Experts in the industry have used several factors to measure the readability element, including the following:

• Speed of perception
• Reading
• Perceptibility at a distance
• Perceptibility in the peripheral vision
• Visibility
• Reflex blink technique
• Eye blinking movements
• Tiredness in reading

Techniques to Improve the Readability of Your Content

The following techniques have been enlisted below by our expert writers’ team. We hope that such tips will surely guide you to increase the chances that your readers start reading and understanding your content if you have focused on implementing them.

1. Use Short Sentences

Long sentences are not easily readable and thus hardly do they coax the readers to go ahead reading from start to end. So, when you are done with your content, give it a quick scan to find out if you can shorten the long sentences by a little trimming to make them more attractive and appealing.

Try not to keep long paragraphs in your content. Keep most of your writing in short sentences and even shorter paragraphs. Such sentences eventually increase readability.

Similar: How to Write Scannable Content 

2. Avoid Jargon or Acronyms

While writing, you are hardly aware of the education level of each and every site visitor who reads you on the website. Thus, avoiding jargon and acronyms or insider words remains an important and perceptive way to improve the readability of the content you write to use on a particular website.

Before uploading any content page, you should, therefore, go through that page keenly with an eye to find out if any of the jargon, acronyms, and or insider words cause deliberate loss of its ascent. If you witness such a case, then immediately replace them with easy and simple words to be grasped by all and sundry.

3. Use Connective Words

There are many connective words, which you must use to increase the readability of your content. Such connective words include firstly, initially, lastly, however, therefore, etc., which help to guide the readers through the sentences and paragraphs.

4. Write Conversationally

Writing conversationally helps you use shorter & simpler words, and create the shortest sentences possible. While creating content for your website, you can even imagine that you are indeed communicating with your friends in real life.

Writing conversationally would change your writing style. You start noticing that thereafter it brings lots of differences from how you normally write. It improves the readability of your content.

5. Break Your Content into Headings & Sub Headings

No one likes a lengthy article or blog to read from start to end. To make that interesting and readable, you should break the content into headings & subheadings. Using long tail keywords in the headings and or subheadings is also advised to avail maximum SEO benefits.

6. Use Images and Graphical Elements

A web page full of content doesn’t appeal to the visitors. It hardly persuades the readers to read from start to finish due to dryness which leads to developing a lack of interest. To reduce that boredom & monotonousness, you should use various types of images and graphical elements that suit the theme while you prepare content. A website content, blog content, or an article full of images and graphics suiting the context and theme would prove highly interactive and thus become shareable as well.

7. Change Technical Words into Easy-to-Read Texts

Make technical terms look easy to read. It will definitely develop an interest in the readers to read the full content with interest. You can do it by adding a phonetic pronunciation or a similar-sounding word in the parentheses. Such steps will persuade as well as assist the readers to get familiarized with the words written.

8. Highlight Useful Information

Before publishing content, read it as many times as possible to find out the factors that are important in your content and why they should appeal to the readers. Highlight them for easy catch and readability. Highlighting important ideas and terms with boldface type, italics or sentence indentions will prove helpful to increase a reader’s mood, thus you get heard.

9. Underline or bold your links

If you underline or bold your links, they get the instant attention of your readers. Your readers expect links to be underlined or bolded, so don’t disappoint. Using appropriate space between lines in a paragraph is also helpful to increase readability.

10. Use a structured hierarchy in your posts

Use a structured hierarchy in your posts to maintain the flow. In order to give your page a more logical flow, you should decorate each post from Title, Intro, Heading, Text, and Subheading to Text.

11. Check Your Readability Score

Do you want to check your readability score? You should check that in order to know the readability score of your website. A free readability test tool lets you enter the URL of your website or copy and paste a passage of text directly into the tool to find out your readability score.

Whether you are an SEO copywriter, marketer, or SEO professional, readability tools will always help you streamline your writing process and to generate content that resonates with your target audiences. Good readability will definitely improve the ranking on your website. It will subsequently bring potential readers to your website to transform them into future customers.

12. Choosing the Right People with Targeted Keywords

Your SEO content won’t become readable enough if it doesn’t reach the right people. If you fail to optimize it with the targeted keywords, the efforts will be worthless.

You must first understand the following:

• Who are your audience segments are;
• What kind of information do they need;
• Why do they need that information;
• Which keywords they are using to find it?

13. Giving Focus on Readability

Readability for a longer dwell time with a few features that consist of the following:

• Clarity
• Organization
• Logic
• Simplicity

To make your content readable or improve the readability of your content, you should ensure that it provides all sorts of desired information understandably.

14. Delve Deeper into Your Content

Create readable content that goes deeper and farther into a topic following a big SEO trend. It works for higher rankings, and according to the digital marketer ‘Eric Enge’, Google is “intensifying its focus” on content quality.

15. Improving Page Speed

Improving your page speed helps your pages and content fully load and display faster. The slowness of your page speed will further make your users disappointed and frustrated. As no one in this fast-paced world would like to sit around waiting for a website to load, your efforts might go in vain if the website is slow.

16. Investing in Visuals

The impact of inserting well-designed, high-quality images in your content will make it more readable, and it will be of much greater value and demand than throwing a couple of random, overused stock photos. Your content will look more readable, cohesive, professional and authoritative with the right images. So, it’s a pretty good idea to invest in them for better SEO.

17. Providing the Facts and properly Citing Them

The Internet has made it more accessible these days for just about any “expert” to make outlandish claims without supporting data. So, to make your content readable enough to support SEO strategies, make sure to cross-check the facts.

18. Featured Snippets—Getting Tons of Attention

To increase the likelihood of your content being readable and getting “snipped” for a few featured snippets, you can adhere to a few tactics:

• Answer questions definitively in your content;
• Maintain the highest possible quality of your content;
• Use numbered and bulleted lists;
• Include statistics and data;
• Structure your content logically.

19. Be the Expert Yourself

If you want to make your content readable enough to support SEO strategies, be the expert, as reputation always matters. According to Google’s recently updated Search quality evaluator guidelines, the content creator and that person’s history both contribute to a page’s quality. Make it a point to create the bios for all of your guest-blogging opportunities.

20. Original Research—A Giant Link Magnet

If you want your content to be readable enough to support SEO strategies, it demands you to include new statistics, studies, information, and research in your pieces. Tons of opportunities will be thrown out to you for other websites to link to you and cite your findings in addition to the incredible value it would generate for your industry and audience if your piece showcases sufficient research.

Conclusion – Improve the Readability of Your Content

Whether content readability is a direct Google ranking factor or not, one thing is confirmed it does influence your search rankings. If your content is not readable, then you will have an increased bounce rate, which is not good for your site at all.

You must ensure that the blog/content/article has an optimum readability element to prevent your readers from leaving the page before they even read the whole content. Improving your content readability will not only increase the chances of getting new clients but also is bound to prove beneficial to your overall SEO strategies. So, get your content written from an India Based Content Development Agency as it has expert writers to create not only readable content but also SEO-friendly content pages.

Some More Resources:

• Power Up Your Content Creation Strategies
• How to Create Link-Generating Contents?
• SEO Tweaks to Improve Website Content’s Value
• Write Readable cum Actionable Content for Improved Engagement
• Notable Role of Content in the Brand Building Process
• How to Optimize Your Contents for Search Engines
• How to Keep the Website Content Fresh?