Readability as an SEO metric

I’ve been looking at ways to help large content teams ensure their work is fine for SEO purposes. Ideally a content team should be self managed, so along with keeping an eye on Spelling and Grammar, you can add in some extra metrics for the team to add to their checklist.

During my University days, I was required to check the readability of all essays and papers that I submitted. MS Word was convenient for this because it has built in readability stats for Flesch Kincaid Reading Level and Flesch Reading Ease along with a few other useful metrics, like passive sentences.

“In a rare stroke of genius, I thought this would be easy for the search engines to incorporate into their algorithms and easy for my content team to incorporate into their quality control. So if search engines value readable content there should be a positive correlation between position on the search engines and readability score…“

To replicate this all you need is a copy of MS Word and Excel. I used 2 different long tail keyword searches and looked at:

• The main block of text by pasting it into MS Word (I stripped out any nav text and headings)
• I left out reviews and user generated content
• I used MS Word’s Readability stats to get data on each chunk of text

The data I gathered from the first 10 pages was mostly irrelevant and no real correlations were found so I got data for the next 20 pages making a total of 30 pages of text for each of the two keywords.

Most of the data I plotted on the graph was messy and inconclusive, but there were some interesting points. Although Flesch Kincaid Grade Level did not show any clear patterns, Flesch Reading Ease showed that pages with higher scores tended to rank higher, indicating that search engines could monitor this as a metric.

Pages that rank higher also had fewer Passive Sentences, indicating a preference for Active Sentences, which are suited to the conversational nature of the web.

Readability as an SEO metric (Keyword 1)

Readability as an SEO metric (Keyword 2)

This method is suited to researching Long Tail Keywords, because branded searches and very competitive keyword searches are very link heavy and text analysis is lower priority (hence the “credit card” sites ranking at #1 with very little text).

To make use of this in your own content projects you could set a minimum Flesch Reading Ease score that all pages must adhere to. The higher the score the easier it is to read. Although the score goes to 100 (easily understood by average 11 year old student) the pages I researched didn’t go any higher than 70. The ideal score could change depending on what area you are optimising for (kids toys etc).

Offline this is already a measurement for several high profile publications like Readers Digest (score 65), Time Magazine (score 52) and Havard Law Review (score 30) and serves as a way to keep text consistent with your audiences expectations. In my opinion, this makes it a worthwhile addition to text optimisation for SEO benefit.

Readability scores for this page:
This article has 0% Passive sentences and a Flesch Reading Ease score of 43.8 and Flesch Kincaid Grade Level of 15.1

Just so you know