what is the readability of a post? Readability refers to the ease of reading and understanding of your post based on aspects such as typography, structure, visual design and difficulty of words and sentences. In other words, when we talk about a readable text we refer to its ease of reading and interpretation.
This concept is currently an important point for your strategy, since a content that is easy to understand is easier to consume. In addition, it is a factor to take into account, because the readability of a post is compensated by search engines such as Google, where an attractive and quality content helps the positioning of your website.
why is readability important?
A good readability in your posts will reduce the reading effort of your readers. If you make readable texts, you will not only reduce the bounce rate among your users, but also Google will compensate you. This search engine has some rules regarding the texts, if your content is simple, provides value and is of quality, you will have a better positioning within it. Readability would enter into your SEO strategy and content marketing .
The important thing is that a good reading and a correct design of the post, reduces abandonment by users. In general, readers tend to make a quick scan before reading, if your post does not catch their attention and seems complicated to understand, they will leave and look for the information elsewhere.
Tools to improve readability
You may now think that this is a difficult task, but the good news is that there are many tools that allow you to measure the readability of your posts. These platforms help you understand what you are doing right and what you need to improve, to help you achieve a high percentage and make your content readable for your customers.
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yOAST
Yoast is a free Wordpress tool. This platform is one of the most popular for creating and managing a blog, and therefore many people use it. We recommend that if you have your blog created with wordpress you use Yoast to check your content, it measures both SEO and readability of your texts.
This tool gives you a report where it informs you about:
- flesch readability
- use of passive and active voice
- distribution of subtitles
- variety of sentence structure
- length of paragraphs and sentences
- number of transition words
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sEMRUSH
SEMrush is an online platform where we find a set of tools for search engine marketing, but we are interested in its tool for the readability of your texts, and this is the SEO writing assistant .
The first thing it shows you is the total score of your website, where it will indicate a score based on the following factors:
- readability
- text length
- keywords or keywords chosen
- keywords or recommended keywords
- title
- links
- paragraph length
- word count and reading time
- voice pitch
This tool stands out because you can choose the level of readability you would like your content to have. But what does this mean? You can customise the tone of voice you would like to convey or how formal or informal you want to sound. You can even check if any of your content is plagiarised. It also stands out from the rest because it shows you questions you might want to consider or ask yourself to improve your content.
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hEMINGWAY
The tool is named after the well-known writer Ernest Hemingway, and is different from the other two because it focuses more on improving writing.
This platform is a designer software to make your writing clearer, riskier but without being complicated for the reader. It has a free version, but to use all its benefits you will have to buy its Premium version.
Its use is simple, copy your content and it will show you the following parameters:
- the readability of your content
- opportunities to use more concise language
- excessive use of adverbs
- use of passive voice
- difficult to read sentences
- places where a simpler sentence could be used
- number of words and characters
- average time to read the content
It is simple to use and each recommendation it makes based on the above will be marked in a different colour.
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sEARCHMETRICS
This tool allows you to get a very complete analysis of your website and check your SEO. Like the previous ones on the list, it provides you with data on sentence structure, word count, keywords used, repetition of phrases and their difficulty, etc.
It is an ideal platform to use in your content marketing plan, as it provides you with information about users, when it is best to publish content and helps you with keyword selection.
All these platforms analyse practically the same parameters, which means that you should pay attention to these details. Do not abuse passive sentences, long and convoluted sentences. We often think that writing in a very complicated way is better, but it has nothing to do with that, think about the profile of your ideal client and write for them.
As you have been able to read throughout the post, there are enough tools to help you improve your texts and make them readable for your users, and don't forget that doing this task will help you with your positioning in search engines.
we hope you enjoyed this article!
