What Website Readability Means and Why It’s Important for SEO
Does your website have high bounce rates; people visit and leave or “bounce” almost immediately? Does your audience seem uninspired or disconnected by what you have to say; leading to a lack of traction and growth?
Take a peek at your site. Are there long blocks of heavy text? Is it difficult to read?
Your site may be suffering from a website readability problem.
If you actively update your content and write — or plan to write — regular blog posts, readability matters greatly. It’s the difference between people sticking around, connecting with you, and growing your practice, or not.
Readability is also a key factor in whether search engines love and rank you, or not.
Why does readability impact search engine optimization?
Search engines optimize their results to please their users; searchers. That’s why the process of attracting a search engine’s affection is dubbed search engine optimization (SEO).
If your website is difficult to read, visitors won’t stick around. Instead, they’ll quickly bounce. This tells search engines that your website hasn’t provided the information a searcher required. That’s a black mark against your name. Why? If a search engine repeatedly doesn’t deliver, the user will find another engine that does.
Search engines, then, prioritize sites with a solid retention rate, where searchers spend a decent amount of time and visit multiple pages. In this way, readability affects your rankings.
So…
If you don’t yet have a therapist website, follow the advice in this article to ensure you get this right; yes, from the get-go.
Wait! You Don’t Have A Therapist Website Yet?
Brighter Vision is the ultimate marketing package for therapists, centered around the best therapist website you’ve ever had. Contact us today to get started.
If you do have a website, the following steps will enhance the readability of your blog and other pages.
Either way, your SEO will improve and so will your practice growth.
What is website readability?
When you think about readability, you might jump to the conclusion that this phrase refers solely to words. What you say is important so we’ll come back to this in a moment. But wooing your tribe is more than written speech alone.
But before we teach you exactly how to boost your website’s readability, what exactly do we mean by this term anyway?
As HotJar says, “Website readability is a measure of how easy it is for visitors to read and understand text on a web page.”
The effectiveness of your content depends on the ability of your visitors to understand and engage with what you have to say. So, readability is hugely important. Otherwise, you’re, in effect, shouting into the void.
How to check the readability of your website?
There is a range of tools to help you assess your website’s readability. Here are our 3 favorites.
1. Yoast
At Brighter Vision, we build client websites on the WordPress platform. This enables us to provide top-quality, user-friendly platforms that integrate with third-party applications. Applications like Yoast.
Yoast is a plugin; a program that boosts SEO and helps you create highly readable content. Once installed, it is simple to use.
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This handy tool uses an algorithm to provide feedback on your page before you hit publish, and after. Yoast combines a number of factors to decide whether your page is a-okay or hard to read. These factors include:
- The Flesch reading ease score, a text analyzer that assesses how simple (or not) your content is to read
- Sentence length
- Paragraph length
- The frequency of subheads
At BrighterVision, we include the Yoast set-up as a standard for our customers. And if you’d like to set up Yoast yourself? Our article, How to Customize Yoast SEO Plugin for Your Therapy Website, walks you through the process.
2. Hemingway Editor
The Hemingway app lets you know how easy (or not) your writing is to read.
This app provides a score for your content in terms of grade level. This way, you can see if your words require a grade three education or university-level understanding. As a rule for online content, lower grades are better.
To use Hemingway, simply head to the site then paste in your content or start typing. Your result will show on the right-hand side of the page.
3. WebFX’s website tool
Want to assess your entire website?
Head over to WebFX’s website readability tool.
Enter your URL and hit the “calculate readability” button.
Voila! In a matter of seconds, you’ll have a score.
Now you know where you stand. Next, focus on improving readability, if needed. If you’ve aced these tests (congrats), work to maintain your wonderful skills.
Not sure if your website has everything it needs?
Test it yourself with our FREE Website Grader quiz!
How to improve website readability
Using the above three tools, decide if your current content is up to scratch. If it is, great! If not, rework your posts and pages to improve reading ease for your visitors.
Improve your word choice
There are a number of ways that word choice improves the delivery of your message. Here are three basic rules…
Keep your word choice simple and succinct
As you might have guessed from the Hemingway tool, simple language is best. Lengthy words, professional jargon, and little-known terms don’t belong on a practice website.
Tip: If you can say something in seven words, don’t use 20.
Use the expressions spoken by your clients
What common phrases or words are frequently used by your ideal clients? Do they say they “feel blue,” “down in the dumps,” or “on edge”? That they “feel frazzled,” “want to punch the wall,” or “don’t feel heard”?
Then incorporate these sayings into your posts and pages.
It helps your audience to feel connected; to believe you know what they’re going through. This builds trust.
Use conversational language
Few people arrive at your site hoping to inhale a textbook. Don’t pen your posts and pages this way. Make it easy for people to consume your content. The best way to do this is to write like you speak: in conversational language.
Tip: Read your writing out loud. It’ll help you to identify places that don’t read well.
Okay, that’s the word basics! But as I mentioned earlier, website readability isn’t only about language choice. Here are five ways to make your content easy to consume.
1. Write scannable content
Chances are a visitor has arrived on your website after searching for an answer to a specific question. Make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for. To do this:
- Use subheads (like the one above that says, “Write scannable content”)
- Use bullet points (yes, just like this)
- Use numbered lists (just like we have)
- Stick to short sentences and paragraphs
- Remember, a blog or informational page isn’t a book. You don’t need to stick to literary rules
2. Use font size to your advantage
The larger the font size, the easier it is to read. Stick to 14 or 16-point font for the bulk of your writing.
3. Opt for high page-font contrast
Keep it simple. Black text on a white background works best.
4. Use concise paragraphs
Got three to four lines in a paragraph? Move on; that’s enough!
Take a look at this article. Can you see how short paragraphs make for easy reading? Remember, you are writing for engagement. Function and performance trump old school rules; always!
5. Highlight and divide your text with impactful images
Include easy-to-digest images that enhance understanding and break up the text.
Lean on us … How does Brighter Vision help with readability?
In a multitude of ways! Our websites are crafted with readability in mind.
We add Yoast to every site we create. This makes it easy and fast to identify and implement improvements.
We embed analytics into each Brighter Vision site. This enables you to see which pages are popular, which have extended viewing times, and which don’t. You can then correct ailing pages to improve readability. This often boosts results.
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Learn more about who’s interacting with your business online; from your website itself, to how it’s performing with search engines, to your email marketing, to social media.
Sign up for a free 14-day trial of our easy-to-use dashboard, Brighter Insights today:
Additionally, we provide pre-written content that has been penned by professional writers. Writers who know how to connect with your current and potential clients.
But for as much as we handle, you still own your website and can freely edit your site’s content so you can maximize readability (many companies don’t). This means you can update content, as required, and without charge.
As you can see, Brighter Vision sites are designed to create a positive, easy-to-read experience.
Creating a therapy website that enhances readability and boosts SEO takes hard work, experience, and expertise. We know because it’s what we at Brighter Vision do so well!
While our sites are gorgeous, if I do say so myself, the reason they’re so powerful is that they work. So, to extend your reach, grow your practice, and propel profits, let’s chat. We look forward to transforming your digital footprint and findability, website readability, and results!
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