Improving and Measuring Your Blog Readability

Content is king! You hear people saying that all of the time and you read about it in so many places online. As you no doubt understand, your content must be well written, enticing, and educational. It must also be appealing to the search engines.

Your blog content

Sometimes, writing content using a blog platform like WordPress and writing content in any other way are very different. As you are writing the blog content, first of all, you need to keep in mind the educational level of your readers. The average American reading level is at the seventh grade. The reading level at which you write your blog content should be connected to which specific target audience you are pursuing. If you are trying to cultivate a very wide target audience, you need to write in a manner to which your readers can relate. There are ways that you can determine the readability of your blogs. In addition to determining your blog readability, you should also try to gather competitive intelligence by comparing your content to that of your competition.

The importance of blog readability

Readability has always been a critical issue when it comes to the success of the content. The more closely your written content matches your spoken language, the more receptive your readers will be to what you are trying to share with them. Clear and concise blog writing will be met with a favorable response from your readers. That has been proven over and over again by the response of readers in the past. Even though you will probably not choose quantity over quality, you will still want your blog content to be read by a large number of people. If you were to write blogs in which the writing is too advanced for the reader, there is a good possibility that a large number of your readers will not stick with the content and read it to the end. If they don’t read all the way to the end, they won’t interact with you and you will not have an opportunity to build a relationship with them. In short, you will be finished before you begin.

How do you measure your blog readability?

There are several different ways in which you can measure your blogs’ readability. some of them are:

• Coleman-Liau Index: This is a readability test that was designed to gauge the comprehensibility of any given text. It tells you at which grade level your content falls.

• Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease: This readability test tells you at which comprehension difficulty level your content falls.

• Gunning-Fog Score: This test tells you the amount of years of education that it would take to understand your content.

• SMOG (Simple Measure of Gobbledygook) Index: This is another readability test that estimates the number of years of education that are needed to understand your blog content.

• Automated Readability Index: This test measures how understandable your blog content is to the readers.

Each test is slightly different so you can choose to use the ones that you want in whatever combination you feel will be most effective for your particular business.

How to measure the readability of your content

There are many different plugins that you can use to measure your content’s readability. The plugins will all give you statistics and analytics. There are some that are definitely worth considering. In addition to the plugins mentioned below, there are others that can help you to improve your content on many different levels.

• Better Writing Plugin: This plugin will provide you with many different analytics, including word count, sentence count, average number of words per sentence, average number of syllables per word, and reading scores of the various readability tests that were discussed above.

• Word Stats Plugin: This plugin adds its own reading level and it has statistics on particular posts, the analysis of this plugin is provided on the site. The plugin has an option for a button on your dashboard  and it provides you with graphs and other charts that gauge the total number of words, types of content, keywords, and content by reading level.

How to improve readability

Improving your blog content’s readability is relatively simple.

• Identify your target level: Your content’s target level is dependent on the particular topics that you are choosing as well as your target audience. You can determine this information by taking several blog posts, performing the readability tests on them, and using the average scores. You can also identify trends that way.

• Identify the extremes and revise them: Identify the blog posts that are at either too high a level or too low a level  and revise them so that they are at the level that you need. This will help you to get where you need to be as far as your content is concerned.

• Identify the appropriate level for your target audience: A good way to determine if you have written content that is exactly at the level that it needs to be for your target audience, write a few above the level and a few below the level and then see how your readers respond.

Conclusion

It is essential that your blog posts are easy to and to comprehend. If you can accomplish that, you will be spot on with your content’s readability. When it comes to success with online content, you should leave nothing to chance. It is important that you are well aware of what you are doing and how other people react to what you are offering them. Readability means that your words flow and that your reader finds your blog content aesthetically pleasing as well.

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