4 Tips for Improving Content Readability

Content readability has become an important factor in any business’s online success. The easier it is to consume content the more people would read and share a web page.

On the other hand, online users would instantly quit a web page that isn’t reader-friendly. This negatively affects brand loyalty, traffic, conversions, and search engine rankings.

Here are a few tips that will help you improve content readability and, in turn, conversion rates, traffic, and search engine rankings.

1. Improve your writing

The way you write your content has a massive impact on the overall content readability level. By improving your writing, you can raise that level.

Here are a few tips for improving your writing and increase content readability:

1. Use shorter sentences.
2. Use shorter paragraphs. Nobody likes to read a huge wall of text.
3. Avoid acronyms and technical jargon. You may fully understand the industry lingo and jargon, but your readers may not.
4. Write in active sentences. Avoid passive sentences.
5. Focus on bullet points whenever possible.
6. Use images and videos to keep it interesting.
7. Divide your text into multiple headings and subheadings for an easier reading experience.
8. Stay on point as much as possible.

2. Use writing tools

There are plenty of writing tools that may help with your writing and, therefore, content readability. In order to improve it, you should regularly use a few of them.

Grammarly, for instance, is a very helpful tool that helps you identify grammatical errors as well as improve sentence structure. Although there is a paid version, the free version also does an adequate job in highlighting and fixing basic errors.

The Hemingway App is another online writing tool that primarily helps you improve readability of a content piece.

The best thing about the Hemingway App is that it identifies sentences that are hard to read. Fixing such hard-to-read sentences can significantly improve readability and average on-page time. It also helps you identify adverbs and passive sentences that you can remove to make your writing tighter. With a score that constantly adjusts as you edit your content, it is very simple to improve your writing.

Readable is another tool that you can use to improve content readability. It measures readability on the basis of popular reading tests, such as the Flesch-Kincaid test. It also displays the count for adjectives, nouns, and adverbs to help you identify areas where you need improvement.

3. Edit… then edit some more

Because blogs often demand a lot of content on a regular basis, editing is one aspect that often takes a backseat.

That shouldn’t happen, though.

Before you publish any piece of content, it is important to do multiple rounds of editing — which goes beyond making grammatical fixes. Editing involves a few things:

• Improving sentence structure
• Removing unnecessary words, phrases, and paragraphs that don’t add any real value.
• Try to trim your content. Most of the time, you will realise that you can remove 20-30% of your content without sacrificing any important point of discussion. Do that.
• Axe the adverbs.
• Remove redundancies. You may have repeated one point a couple of times in a blog post.
• Replace technical and complex words with simple ones.

4. Make sure that the website design is immaculate

Lastly, the website design plays a tremendously important role in improving the overall level of content readability.

From white space to selection of font to font size, everything is important.

Make sure you are using an appropriate colour palette. Secondly, ensure that there is enough white space on the page.

Furthermore, select a font that is easily readable. It doesn’t have to be fancy. A simple sans-serif font, such as Open Sans can do the job. However, it should go well with the overall theme of the design, and the line spacing has to be right. Here is an example.

Conclusion

Content readability is one of those factors that may not directly affect a website’s traffic and search engine rankings. But it does have a massive indirect impact on almost everything.

More readers bring more leads and, eventually, increased profits. But that’s only possible with high-quality, better content readability, and an excellent overall user experience.