In the world of digital marketing, Search Engine Optimisation is your best friend.
Whilst Google claims to take into account 200+ factors when determining different website’s ranking on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), there are 5 top factors you should take into consideration first.
These are:
- Technical SEO: Involves website speed, mobile optimisation, and crawlability for search engines.
- Keyword Optimisation: Involves using keywords on your website so that search engines can learn and understand what your content is about.
- Quality Content: Involves producing and publishing content that people actually care about and want to read. Must be high-quality, informative, and relevant.
- Backlinks: Involves creating/acquiring links from other websites to your websites. These must be of a high-quality to make your site more authoritative.
- User Experience (UX): Involves looking at how easy it is to use your website, how enjoyable it is, and how easy it is to navigate.
Today, I want to delve more deeply into a factor that underpins your whole website, and that is readability.
Does Readability Affect Your SEO?
Arguably, readability, could be a part of your website’s user experience factor, or quality content factor, but it goes a bit deeper than that. Of course you want your readers to understand your content in the same way that you can follow a coherent story, but how is this actually calculated?
Several factors can be considered when assessing for readability, having a good page structure, the ‘flow’ of the writing, the word choice, the sentence length, the colours used for text versus the background.
The Flesch Reading Scale
But most SEO checker tools will use a formula known as the Flesch Reading Ease score. This is a system that ranks how easy to read your text is. It works by taking the average number of words in your sentences, and the average number of syllables per words, and turns the, into a number. Your text will be ranked on a 0-100 scale. The higher the number, the more readable the text.
To simplify:
Short words in line good. Long words in line bad.
Expansive lexemes formulated into prolonged sentences consequently yields impenetrable barriers restricting effortless comprehension.
Score Meaning
90-100: Very easy to read, easily understood by an average 11-year-old student
80-90: Easy to read
70-80: Fairly easy to read
60-70: Easily understood by 13- to 15-year-old students
50-60: Fairly difficult to read
30-50: Difficult to read, best understood by college graduates
0-30: Very difficult to read, best understood by university graduates.
But is this too reductive?
Going by my previous sentences, ‘Short words in line good. Long words in line bad.’ would score 95.17 and ‘Expansive lexemes formulated into prolonged sentences consequently yields impenetrable barriers restricting effortless comprehension’ would score -55.13.
Whilst one is certainly easier on the eyes than the other, the first sentence does not abide by good grammar rules and feels almost childish to read. If every text on the internet was written in this ultra simplistic way people would probably start to lose their minds, alongside general reading comprehension abilities taking a drastic plunge. It also begs the question, why should every text aim to be understood by 11-year-olds?
Who Are You Writing For?
It is important here to take into account who your target market is. Brands like McDonalds will naturally tailor their language to be more simplistic, therefore ranking higher on the Flesch Reading Ease scale, as their target market is a younger demographic. However, for brands such as Burberry, their luxurious nature is also reflected through their more refined use of language.
Is it then to say that McDonalds is above Burberry and that because of Burberry’s lesser readability score they will fail to rank on the SERPs and fade into obscurity?
No.
Is Readability Useless?
If you’re looking for quick results to boost your search engine ranking, investing in an SEO wizard to rewrite all your content into short, single syllable sentences isn’t worth it. However, if your content is convoluted, poorly laid out, and inconsistent in writing style, it might be time for a content audit to refresh what’s already there.
Words aren’t math. You cannot strip back the readability of text to a simple formula. There are too many factors to cut it back to something so basic. Whilst short, stilted sentences aren’t pleasant to read, neither is your own version of War & Peace. It’s about finding that happy medium that works for your target audience and the messages that you want to convey as a brand.
Learning From Others
As a copy and content writer the most important lesson I’ve learnt it to write what you yourself would read, both stylistically and in terms of content.
I like to abide by the notion of “Smart Brevity” as coined by Axios journalists Mike Allen, Roy Schwartz, and Jim VandeHei. “Smart Brevity” is the ideas of cutting through the fluff, tightening details to what’s new and necessary, organising them in a way that’s efficient for an audience, and styling it in a way that’s easy to absorb. The irony is not lost on me however, that their book on the subject could’ve been shorter and more succinct.
Noble Prize-winning author Ernest Hemmingway was criticised for his ‘simple’ writing, fellow Nobel Laureate William Faulker slated Hemmingway saying:
“He has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used.”
In response we have Hemmingway’s true mic-drop moment:
“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”
Be more like Hemmingway.
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