What Is the Importance of Improved Readability

People read and understand content faster when it has a higher readability score. The reasons for this are numerous and tied directly to our psychology. When your content readability needs improvement, it means your message is not accessible to everyone.

What Is Readability?

There are many ways to define text readability, such as by the number of words per sentence or paragraph. A high-readability text is easy to read, understand, and remember. Many factors contribute to the readability of text, including sentence length, voice techniques, sentence structure, function words, and alignment.

A poor-readability text is hard to read and difficult to understand. When content is not accessible to its intended audience, it loses its value.

Several measures are used to gauge readability, which include a readability score.

With these scores, you can determine the grade level needed to understand the meaning of a passage of text. The scores will also help you tailor your writing to the specifics of your target audience.

Why Is Readability Important to Your Writing?

It’s vital to communicate your thoughts, messages, and other information in a well-organized and readable format. This is only possible if it’s of high readability.

Understanding the methods used to create it will help you write a coherent piece.

Essentially, you make it easier for visitors to scan your text to find what they’re looking for. Consequently, your brand can achieve its goal quickly, increasing the likelihood of them converting or engaging with audience.

Moreover, the content you write, with short sentences, a straightforward structure, and relatively simple vocabulary, will translate well to voice search. It is generally possible to hear voice search answers easily, which is impossible with long, clunky paragraphs.

Knowledge of what makes content more readable will help you craft content that matches user intent and provides a good user experience. This will result in a reduction in bounce rates and an increase in conversions and time spent on the page.

What Does a Readability Score Mean?

You can solve readability problems by assigning them a score. Readability is measured by factors like the number of syllables per word, the sentence length, and the frequency of words.

Flesch Reading Ease is one of the frequently used data scores for measuring content readability. The scores for this particular test range from 0 to 100.

Another popular measurement of readability is the Flesh-Kincaid reading grade level score. This test assigns the text a level of education a US student would need to fully understand the text.

We now have handy online calculators for computing our scores for our text messages. This metric analyzes the sentence and word length to assign a score.

The score is inversely proportional to the Reading ease scores. A higher reading ease score means a lower school grade level. Moreover, content readability is a vital factor for Google ranking.

So what do you do when your content readability needs improvement?

Content Readability Needs Improvement? — Here are Seven Tips for Help

Content with improved readability helps you increase your SEO rankings, increase engagement, and improve conversions. That’s great, but it’s not always easy to write readable content.

By now, you probably already understand the importance of readability. It is a vital factor that counts for your content to succeed.

Below are seven tips to help improve the readability of your content:

1. Make Your Sentences Shorter

Online users have a minimal time span. If your text isn’t a hit with them, they will simply move on. You must make sure that your content is clear and concise to keep your audience engaged. Though there’s no word limit on the sentence length, but a rule of thumb is to restrict sentences within 20 words.

2. Write Shorter Paragraphs

Long paragraphs will drive the readers away from your page as they won’t be able to quickly scan through the text at first glance. A section with no more than five sentences is preferable to improve the readability of your text. You can use subheading to split chunks of text into shorter and easily digestible segments.

3. Avoid Using Long & Complex Words

Be mindful of the language and words you use in your content. The broader audience might have basic vocabulary knowledge. So, keep your content at a level that makes your message accessible to everyone.

4. Add Images and Videos

The best way to communicate with visual learners is through images and videos to your content. Meaningful pictures and infographics will entertain the readers, while videos can quickly summarize a complex topic in simple words and animations.

5. Make Less Use of Passive Voice

Writing in the active voice is more direct and improves the clarity of your sentences. Although writing in passive voice is very frequent, it won’t cut you through the readability test. It’s wise to keep passive voice sentences as minimum as possible. The key is to be clear, concise, and comprehensible!

6. Use Transitional Words

Make good use of transitional words in your writing as they make your ideas connect and flow smoothly. Not using transitional words would disrupt the logical structure of your sentences and make your content difficult to understand.

7. Write in a Conversational Tone

It is important to keep your audience in mind and connect with them. You need to write in a conversational tone that makes the reader feel inclusive and holds their interest. Try avoiding filler words and jargon to write easy-to-read content.

Now you know what to do when your readability needs improvement. But why is it neccessary on WordPress blogs?

Why Should You Improve the Readability of WordPress Blogs?

Readability can be tricky, but you can reap benefits such as increased productivity, better engagement, and better conversion.

A WordPress blog should include clear, engaging, and easy-to-read content when writing for an online audience. If people are unhappy with what you offer, they will quickly switch to another website’s content.

WordPress emphasizes readability as to your website’s success. The search engine can recognize quality content and predict what users will enjoy. A blog usually requires a lot of effort and consistency. It is part of creating the perfect blog post: researching, writing, editing, and promoting.

Even if you do all of them, you might notice that your blog posts are not getting as much attention as expected. Lack of engagement could be due to the poor readability of your blog posts.

Only then can you expect returning visitors and a higher conversion rate. Otherwise, you risk losing your audience and wasting valuable time and money on your WordPress site.

You can try out our INK Pro editor and download the INK WordPress Plugin to ensure that your blog’s readability is always high. It will make dragging dropping images or SEO-optimized files into WordPress very easy.

Wrapping Up

We write for people to read. But we also understand that good writing is complex and takes a lot of work. However, the goal of every writer is to communicate clearly. A high readability score can help with that.

Sometimes we let our eyes guide us instead of our words, which can result in mistakes, misreadings, and ineffective communication.

It’s time to try and look for the factors that can improve your content and make it rank higher in SEO. This article discusses why and how you can improve the readability of your content by following a few simple steps.

Regardless of how much effort you put into your writing, you haven’t done it right if it is hard to read for target audiences!