Yoast SEO 19.14: Inclusive language analysis improvements

Last year, we launched the inclusive language analysis to help you open up your content to a broader audience. It’s been well-received, with thousands of people already using it to help improve their content. The analysis is free for everyone, so try it if you haven’t. In Yoast SEO 19.14, we’re improving the analysis.

Why the inclusive language analysis?

Your SEO efforts often go hand in hand with expanding your audience. One way to achieve this is by crafting your content inclusive, which can make it more accessible to a broader range of people. The more individuals read and interact with your content, the higher the likelihood it will be shared, liked, or linked to by others.

Google also increasingly looks for language that’s helpful, not harmful. The latest updates to the Quality Raters Guidelines, released in December 2022, adds new examples of content that may be harmful to groups. With E-E-A-T, Google will focus more and more on finding and ranking content that’s truly helpful to a large audience.

The inclusive language analysis helps highlight non-inclusive terms and suggests inclusive replacements. It’s easy to use and doesn’t block your work while writing. It’s also opt-in, so you have to turn it on to start using it.

Improvements to the inclusive language analysis

We’ve launched the inclusive language analysis in beta form, so we can collect feedback and improve based on that. Our team of expert linguists also has a long list of enhancements they want to add, making the analysis as valuable and helpful as possible.

In Yoast SEO 19.14, we launch the first wave of improvements. These mainly concern changes in which context we flag specific terms. Sometimes, terms are only harmful when used in a particular situation. We’ve fine-tuned the list of non-inclusive phrases and expanded it with more words. We’ve also added more alternatives for some terms to suggest the writer replace the non-inclusive terms, and we’ve improved some of the feedback writers get.

And we’re now also taking into account whether phrases are preceded and/or followed by function words, participles, and/or punctuation marks. This means we can determine for even more cases whether a term is used in a non-inclusive way and give feedback to change it.

Update now to Yoast SEO 19.14

Yoast SEO 19.14 comes with the first wave of improvements to the inclusive language analysis. With this, we’re making it easier to find non-inclusive terms and giving better feedback on improving your content.