Arrange readability? About Ease of Reading and SEO • Yoast

Is it worth reading your text easily? Will this lead to higher rankings and more traffic? In simpler terms: Arrange readability? At Yoast, we are convinced that writing in simple and understandable language can and will bring you more visitors. We even developed a tool to help people write legible text. In this post, we explain why search engines like an easy-to-understand copy, and we give tips on how to create it.

Well-written copy enhances user experience

At the risk of indicating the obvious: incomprehensible copy, it results in a bad user experience. No one likes to read something that is difficult to follow, boring or full of keywords. All your online copies should be aimed at your audience. It should be the necessary information, a solution to their problem or an answer to their question.

To get your pages high in Google, you may have the instinct to write a text that the search engines will easily understand. Which is not necessarily wrong. But first, you need to create pages that provide an excellent copy (and a wonderful experience) for your visitors. This fits in well with our vision of holistic SEO. If you write a text that is difficult to understand, people will not find what they need. In addition, you end up with dissatisfied visitors returning to Google when they visit your site. Google Analytics user signals such as determining how visitors experience your site.

Search engines mimic people

There used to be a time when filling in keywords in your copy would work. If you mentioned your keywords just enough times in your text, Google would highly value them for the keywords. Those times are long gone. These days, you need to be more mindful of the query density of your text.

Google has become much better at recognizing quality content. For example, Google now recognizes synonyms. It also understands which words, entities and content are related together. In addition, search engines are getting better at predicting what people want to read. From the keywords in someone’s search, they can make a framed guess of them search intent.

In general, Google’s algorithm tries to mimic one. It tries to read text as one would. As Google becomes more able to understand and scan texts in a human way, readability becomes more important to your rankings.

Voice search and accessibility

Many people use voice search, so Google and other search engines also focus a lot on voice. Imagine a long paragraph that consists of convoluted sentences and contains very difficult words. Now imagine that the paragraph is read aloud. The voting result would become impossible to understand. Google does not want to use such an answer. Not in voice search or in normal results. This is another reason why readability can help your rankings. Google prefers texts that are easy to follow, even when read aloud through voice search.

But readability is also important in terms of accessibility. You need to keep in mind that not everyone who visits your page will experience it the same way. Some people with a visual impairment may use a screen reader to go through your content. You do not want them to leave your page because your text is too long. But that’s not all. Like Google itself, they rely on the correct use of headings to understand what your text is about. Remember that accessibility issues, and not just for SEO.

What makes a text easy to read?

How do people read text online? Of course, we all want to write the text that visitors will be happy to read from beginning to end. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. Mostly people browse through texts, read subheadings and the first sentences of the paragraphs that they consider relevant. They are looking for transition words to be able to quickly abstract what will be the most important conclusion of an article.

All the things people do while reading your text are things Google will do. This means that the structure of your text, the way you write your paragraphs, is becoming increasingly important. Key sentences – the first sentence of each paragraph – should contain the most important message of the paragraph. And having a clear and logical structure in your text is invaluable.

Tips to keep your text readable

Let’s talk about how we can create easy reading. For you start writing think about the structure of your text. What do you want to say to your audience and in what order? Is this a logical sequence of topics? Will your audience be able to follow your arguments, your examples and your main message? Maybe you should try content with the inverted pyramid style?

Try to use short mind where you can, as long sentences are much harder to process. Avoid or limit the number of difficult words in a text. Try not to use complicated sentences, and avoid using them passive voice. Also, make sure that you write in an attractive style. It can be really hard; not everyone has a talent for creative writing. It helps to mix it up a bit! Try to alternate long sentences with shorter ones. Use synonyms. Avoid starting sentences with the same word. And look at us 5 tips for writing a readable blog post.

We know it’s hard to write a readable copy. Writing an illegible text is an error we often see. That is why we have a readability analysis in Yoast SEO. It checks, for example, whether your sentences are not too long, whether you do not use passive voice too often and whether length of your paragraphs is okay. The analysis gives you tips on how to improve, and you can even see which sentences need a second time. We are constantly changing it, adding new checks and translating it into so many different ones tale if possible. We currently have 18 languages! The analysis is available in our free and Premium Yoast SEO Plugin.

One last tip: read it aloud!

Google’s Gary Illyes once tweeted that you should read your text aloud. If it does not read well or sounds strange, it will probably not have a ranking either.

Let us be clear: your rankings do not rise immediately if you improve the readability of your texts. But writing a readable blog post is an essential part of every SEO strategy. If you want your readers to read your entire blog post or page, your copy should be easy to read. Placements that are readable will definitely result in more visitors and a higher conversion rate. So in the long run: readability rankings.

Keep reading: SEO Copywriting: The Complete Guide »