What Is Content Readability & Why Is It Important?

The first step to effective content isn’t keywords or paid promotions… it’s convincing your reader that your content is worth reading. This is when content readability enters the picture; once your optimization and ads bring readers to your site, readability determines if they’ll stay or leave. Dive deeper into content readability and its importance in today’s world through our blog.

What Is Content Readability?

Content readability refers to the ease with which your target audience can consume and understand your content. We’re living in a world that has an attention span of just 8.25 seconds. Needless to say, our content needs to retain the attention of our users.

Readable content comprises several elements that each leave an impression on a reader, in turn affecting their desire to keep reading. The most obvious of these is sentence and paragraph length; short paragraphs and simple structuring help your readers grasp your content with ease. 

Another is formatting, including bullet points, headers, and subheaders, which enables visitors to skim through your work. Without formatting and appropriate structuring, readers will see a wall of text, prompting them to exit your page without trying to decipher your content.

Active voice is a third feature, making it engaging and easier for readers to understand content as compared to passive voice. Last but not least is the use of jargon and vocabulary. When readers see a lot of jargon and needlessly complicated words, they feel alienated from the content. This will result in them leaving your website in search of better-explained answers.

Content Readability Score

A content readability score refers to a scoring system that helps to determine the level of ease with which your readers can understand your content. It’s calculated using various mathematical formulas such as Flesch-Kincaid (the most common one), Gunning Fog, and Coleman-Liau. These formulas use certain parameters to determine the score, like average sentence length and average number of syllables per word.

You can achieve a good score provided you practice all the ways to make your content readable to your users. As scores go, anything above 60% is a good score to achieve. Anything in the 60 to 70% range means there’s room for improvement that you should pursue, while anything lower is far too low.

Why Is Content Readability Important?

• Getting your message across to your readers: It’s not just what you’re trying to say, it’s how you say it! Even the most relatable anecdotes will be skipped if what you’re saying is tough to follow.
• Better user experience: A blog that’s well-structured and well-written is already winning over messier competitors. Better user experience helps establish your credibility and brand awareness, helping lay the foundation for further successes.

• Ranking: Your website needs to be readable by not just your users, but also by your search engine. You should be properly using tags, bullet points, page layouts, and much more. This will help the search engines to easily crawl your website and increase your chances to rank on the first page of the search results.
• Accessibility: Text that’s not readable is also not accessible, and this may be a problem to a much larger audience than you anticipate. Content that’s easy to read and consume is helpful for people with lower literacy levels, those using assistive technologies, those with attention disorders, and so many more. In fact, the World Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) goes into detail about how readability directly affects accessibility.
• Bounce Rate: You don’t want this rate to be high when viewing your Google Analytics report! Bounce rate refers to the rate at which users leave your website after visiting only one page and not taking any action. Content with bad readability is that much more challenging and difficult to consume, naturally leading to a higher bounce rate.

FAQs

Why Does Readability Matter?

Readability affects a bunch of important aspects that determine the success of your blog and of your website. In a nutshell, bad readability lowers your authority with search engines and also makes for bad user experience. Without good readability, no advertisements or paid campaigns will be enough to see the results you desire.

How Can Brands Improve The Readability Of Their Content?

There are certain ways in which brands can improve the content readability, such as using short sentences, avoiding the use of complex words, chunking paragraphs well, and using active voice.

What Is A Content Readability Score?

A content readability score helps to determine how effectively your target audience understands your content. There are several sites online that help you understand how readable your content is using the score.

How Much Should The Content Readability Score Be?

A readability score should ideally be above 60%; anything below means your readers will have a tough time consuming your content. A score of around 60% means there are still improvements you ought to be looking into.