Essentials of Readability
Here are some reasons readability matters and should be taken seriously:
1. The Effectiveness of your Content depends on it
Content that is difficult to understand is not fit for the search engine. If people can’t understand your content, they will abandon it and search for alternatives. Therefore, good readability helps to increase the effectiveness of your content.
2. Understand Reader’s Reading Age
When you are writing content, know who your potential audience is and their age range. An app like Grammarly and Hemingway can provide you with the reading age of your content. These two apps are worth using because they ensure that your content is quality and can be read easily.
Complicated and big language will discourage your audience from reading your content. For content with a readability score of Grade 8, 85% of your audience will be able to read your content. If you can bring this score lower, more people will read it.
3. Improve Website Accessibility
The behavior of visitors that come to your site is tracked by search engines. Only engaging content can keep your audience on your site for a longer time. Once your audience stays on your site for a long time, this signals the search engine that your site is quality and contains useful information.
When you are dealing with the readability score of your content, try and shorten the long sentence, so it can be easily read and understood. You should also use an active voice rather than a passive voice while writing. This will help you increase readability.
4. Understand Your Online Reader
You really need to understand how your readers behave. There is a difference in the way a reader reads online and how they read offline. Online readers just skim through the content and this is because they are looking for particular information.
They only go through 18% of the whole content. If your sentences are too lengthy and complex, your readers will be discouraged and move on to another site.
That's right!
Even myself when it comes to comments, I read some people's site at least twice until I am able to grasp the information and submit a comment.
Readability and being able to transform the meaning of sentence to the site visitor is important.
Regards,
Meena