Is readability oversimplifying or opening up?

Writing a readable text can be daunting, especially if the topic of your blog is difficult or extremely technical. Is it necessary to focus on readability if your audience is used to your jargon? Well, although your audience might be up to the task of reading your lingo, the entire purpose of SEO is to attract traffic beyond the audience you already reach. If you aim for the top positions in the search engines, you should have readable and understandable texts for a large audience. This doesn’t mean you’re oversimplifying for the sake of readability. I explain why and how you should ensure your text is readable.

Writing a readable text is hard

We do feel your pain. We understand you chase those green readability bullets, and that can be hard if you’re writing for an advanced audience. Sometimes, people vent their frustrations on Twitter. One of our users tweeted, ‘My blog posts are written for grownups, and I write at the college level. Sorry, but I don’t know how to dumb myself down.’

We get that it might feel like you need to oversimplify to get the readability bullets green. However, you could also try to think of it as opening your content up to an audience you’ve not yet reached. And that’s the goal of any SEO strategy: getting that traffic to your website!

Why should I care about readability?

Readability is important for your user. Reading from a screen is hard, and people get distracted quickly. But, most importantly, you want people to understand what you’re writing. You want to get your message across. Nobody likes to read something incomprehensible, boring, or stuffed with keywords. If you write a text people don’t understand, you won’t help people find what they need. 

Moreover, readability is also important for Google. Of course, if your text is better for the user, it will rank better, as Google optimizes for that user. It is very important to realize that Google’s algorithm is trying to mimic humans. It tries to read texts the way humans read texts. As Google becomes more capable of understanding and scanning texts in a human-like way, the demands on the readability of text also rise. Google will have a hard time reading sentences that are very long or have complicated grammatical structures. It will be harder for Google to figure out what they’re about for these texts. This will result in lower rankings as well.

Read more about the importance of readability in our blog post ‘Does readability rank?’

Is oversimplifying necessary for readability?

Some niches require lingo. For technical blogs, you’ll probably use difficult, technical terms. You cannot avoid that. Nevertheless, that does not mean such a text can’t comply with our readability analysis. In my previous life, I wrote a PhD thesis called ‘The intergenerational transmission of criminal convictions over the life course.’ This was a hard topic. It involved many technical terms, cryptical hypotheses, and boring analyses. However, the introduction of my PhD thesis complies with the Yoast readability analysis (I did not enter the entire thesis as it contains a lot of tables and references). I needed to add subheadings and white spaces between paragraphs, because that is not particularly common in the field of research I did my PhD in.

Without wanting to brag, I have a green bullet for readability on all my blog posts. However, I often fail to comply with at least one of the checks. For this blog post, I had a hard time complying with passive voice (but still got a green bullet in the end). In other cases, I got orange bullets for transition words.

It’s important to realize that one red bullet is not a problem yet. You should focus on getting your overall bullet green. If your sentences are a bit too long, but you compensate for that with short paragraphs, your text will be a good read overall. The following tips will help you improve the readability of texts with complex topics.

Tips on opening up your writing style

What to do if you fail our readability analysis and write about a complicated topic? First of all, I recommend you shorten your sentences. You should probably not avoid the technical lingo you’re using, but you can try writing about complicated matters in short sentences. Usually, you’ve created a combined sentence when a sentence is rather lengthy. Such sentences can be easily split into two (or three even). Our readability analysis lets you highlight your lengthy sentences. That makes it easy to find and shorten them.

The second thing you can do if you’re writing about something complicated is to pay attention to your paragraphs. Start a paragraph with the most important sentence, then explain or elaborate on that sentence. This helps a reader to grasp the concept of your article just by reading the first sentence of each paragraph. Ensure your paragraphs aren’t too long (7 or 8 sentences are long enough). Add a subheading that tells the reader what to expect in that paragraph. That will help your reader grasp your text’s meaning much more easily.

A final tip on quickly improving readability without oversimplifying is to use transition words. You can make your writing much more readable by using proper transition words like ‘most important’ and ‘because’. The Yoast readability analysis allows you to check your use of transition words. If you use too few, you can add extra transition words in pieces of your text where you have very few. Using transition words is like putting cement between your sentences. The relationship between two sentences becomes apparent through the use of transition words. Readers will understand your content better using these kinds of words properly.

Conclusion: open up to a large audience!

SEO’s goal is to attract new visitors to your website. You want to rank high in Google to get people to click on your results and stay and read your post. No matter how difficult the topic you’re writing about, you should make your text readable if you care about SEO. You don’t need to oversimplify for the sake of readability but do ensure it is easy to read for everyone. Your users and Google will reward you for it!

Read more: “Yoast SEO hates my writing style!” – Common misconceptions about the Yoast plugin »