It’s not easy attracting people’s attention these days, especially on the Internet, where everything is just a fast click away. On average, users will spend between 45 and 54 seconds on your website. That’s definitely not enough time to pitch your idea, let alone build a meaningful relationship. Naturally, you need a trick up your sleeve to persuade them to spend more time on your internet place than anywhere else. Having a well-written, engaging, and easily readable blog post is your ace in the hole.

Blog posts are not just to show off you know your industry and niche inside out. That’s a part of it, but not the main point. The focus of your blog is answering questions that users may have about your business, industry, and practices. However, to be efficient, these blog posts must have some qualities that will grab the user’s attention and push them to read the whole thing to the end.

Naturally, since Google is also keen on giving the best options to its users, the tech giant has some specific readability preferences. Following them will trebuchet your blog post at the forefront of the search results. Of course, this will lead to increased traffic, better CTR, more sales, higher revenue, and a bigger smile on your face. That’s what we call a win.

So, perfect readability is a must if you want to beat the odds and keep your audience around longer. But how can you make your blog posts irresistible to readers? Well, let’s have a look.

Why is perfect readability a must?

Before we get to the “How,” let’s briefly discuss the “Why.” The main reason why one visits your blog post is to find an answer to a burning question. Naturally, the quicker and easier they find the answer, the more satisfied they will be. So, building your blog posts and writing them in a clean, easily digestible, and organized manner will boost your user experience, which will inadvertently help you with your SEO score.

Still, when writing a blog post, don’t forget that you are not writing for Google and its crawlers. You’re not writing for a machine. Yes, having good SERP results is great, but when push comes to shove, you write for human beings. If you forget that simple truth, your blog is nothing more than a waste of your time and that of your audience.

So, what should you do? Well, it’s simple, really. All you need to do is please both Google and your readers. Thus, you will need a general understanding of Google’s guidelines for readability and the talent to build upon them to make your blog post not only Google-worthy but also reader-worth. The good news is that WordPress has the perfect plugin to help you appease at least Google – YOAST SEO.

What is YOAST, and should you follow its advice?

The short answer is a resounding YES. YOAST is a great tool that offers an accessible and comprehensive overlook of your blog posts’ SEO and readability. The plugin scans your text and suggests ways to improve your readability based on Google’s recommendations on how a blog post should look like. The plugin highlights several measurable readability features:

Subheading distribution

Subheadings divide your blog post into easily digestible topics within the spectrum of the overall theme. This way, if a user is interested in a specific point of your presentation, they can easily find it without having to read the entire text. For example, if you are discussing the various features of a vacuum cleaner, the user may be interested just in its suction power. Thus, having a separate subheading dedicated to this feature will help them pinpoint it faster and enhance the overall user experience.

Moreover, subheadings are the perfect way to include some additional keyphrases in your text. However, don’t be tempted to build your subheadings solely on long-tail keyword demand. This will ruin the entire blog post.

As a general rule of thumb, try to keep your subheading sections up to 300 words. This way, you won’t overexplain, but you can still have enough room to give all the relevant information with examples. If a sub-topic is more extensive and you need more words, introduce an additional layer of sub-division in the form of H3 headlines.

Paragraph length

Paragraphs are literary devices that separate different themes within a text. They come naturally within the text, making it much more readable. Still, you must be careful not to extend a paragraph for too long. You need to be able to finish your thought within 5-6 sentences, all of which should be in total 150 words.

What YOAST won’t tell you is that you must avoid one-word or one-sentence paragraphs as well. Yes, there are times when you can place such, but they are extremely rare. You are not writing a WhatsApp message. You are writing a blog post. So, use one-sentence or one-word paragraphs only when you want to underline a point heavily.

Sentence length

Have you ever read a sentence that has no end in sight? Not a great read, you will undoubtedly agree. Long sentences are sometimes a necessity. Still, if your entire blog post is filled with complex sentences with several subordinate clauses, then you might lose your readers along the way. Keep the majority of your sentences below 20 words to avoid this problem. You can, of course, have occasional lengthy sentences. Just make sure to keep them at a minimum and only when you can’t make them into two sentences. After all, you are trying to explain a complicated topic in a simple language, not creating a literary masterpiece.

Word complexity

Do not assume knowledge is one of the few golden rules of content writing. Using lingo, industry slang, and other complex words that might be known to professionals but not as much to the broader audience is a huge deal breaker to many readers. Imagine if you are looking for car tires. You open an article to see the best choices for your car, and you are flooded by definitions, measurements, and stats that mean absolutely nothing to you. Would you stay and try to understand what the writer had in mind, or would you go to another article where everything is explained simpler?

The same goes for uncommon and highly complicated words that even fluent speakers would barely understand. The English language is abundant in complex terms that only scholars and snobs use nowadays. So, try to avoid them, especially if your audience is not filled with snobs and scholars.

Transitional words

You should write as you talk. Well, not strictly, but you should follow the same logic. When you speak, you use transitional words so your listeners will follow your thoughts easily. The same goes for your written words. If you want your readers to follow the flow of your thoughts, adding transitional words is a must. The lack of such transitional words indicates the absence of a coherent idea behind your writing. So, make sure to give your text the flow it deserves through some transitional words like “so,” “therefore,” “however,” “besides that,” “also,” and others.

Passive voice

This is the bane of any text. Passive voice makes the text seem distant and boring. Moreover, it makes your sentences wordier and harder to understand. That doesn’t mean you should entirely cut passive voice from your texts. But keep them at a reasonable number and try to use an active voice where possible.

Sentence beginnings

Finally, we have the start of your text. Beginning sentences with the same word or structure are just a sign of bad writing. Of course, this rule has some exceptions, but they are extremely rare. You can use the same beginning to several consecutive sentences, only to accentuate a point and only once in your entire text. Naturally, this should be the climax of your text. Still, as a general rule of thumb, try to avoid starting the consecutive sentences with the same structure, let alone the exact words.

You can count on YOAST to track all these signs of excellent readability. Moreover, if you have made some of these mistakes, YOAST will underline them, so you won’t have to search in your entire text. That’s quite handy when you’ve written a 3000-word article. But is this enough?

Are YOAST suggestions enough?

No. These suggestions are a great start, but they are far from enough to make your text the best it can be. YOAST is excellent at its job, but its scope follows only Google’s recommendations. So, if your goal is to appease the crawlers, you can stop at YOAST’s suggestions and be done with it. However, if you want to keep your audience entertained and informed, you must go above and beyond.

After all, no one in their right mind will count what percentage of your sentences are above 20 words. That’s Google’s arbitrary suggestion that presumes that longer sentences are harder to understand. And this is not too far off. Still, there are far more important factors that can make a text easier to understand.

How to better your readability beyond YOAST’s suggestions

Most of these factors are quite intuitive. Yet many blog posts lack them for one reason or another. The main idea behind these points is not to increase your SEO rating but to better the user experience and make your blog post more readable for humans.

Know your audience

If you are a marketer, you would know that every action, no matter what it is, starts precisely with knowing your audience. Your entire establishment is dedicated to a particular group of people interested in your product or service.

Naturally, pinpointing this group will give you invaluable information on how to make your blog posts more readable for them. For example, if your blog posts target younger or non-specialist audiences, you must give them shorter and to-point answers to their questions. The younger generation has no patience for lengthy explanations.

Still, that doesn’t mean you can’t add all the relevant information. All it means is that you must format it to suit their needs. Thus, you will need shorter subheading segments, focusing more on the why rather than the how.

On the other hand, if your blog post targets professionals, they’d much rather have a full explanation with examples and specific scenarios. Thus, your subheading sections will have additional divisions. Actually, this blog post is an excellent example of this.

Don’t overbulk your post

You are not writing a high-school assignment, so there is no specific word count that you must get. Well, okay, there is. Actually, the best practices show that blog posts between 1000 and 2000 words are the norm. If you are trying to produce high-quality content, 2000 words are the minimum. However, that doesn’t mean that you must overbulk your articles. Keep it to the point. Most topics, especially those for specialists, have enough relevant information to share, so don’t worry. You will get to the recommended word count and more. Still, if the topic doesn’t allow you to reach a specific word count, don’t force it. Better to keep it short and simple rather than just blabber on and on.

For example, the topic of how to build a winning marketing strategy is obviously not something you can explain in 1,000 or even 2,000 words. It’s not an easy concept. On the other hand, an article on how to tie your shoelaces so they won’t untie can be explained faster with far less going into detail.

Don’t over-format

Speaking of overdoing it, you need to consider how much formatting you do on your blog. Yes, your blog post should be skimmable, but over-formatting will do more harm than good.

Naturally, using some italicized words is okay. The same goes for occasional bolding. But having every third word different than the last is too much.

So, instead, go for the H2 and H3 subheadings. If you need to do a further division, consider whether some bullet points won’t do the trick. However, don’t overdo it with bullet points as well. They are a great tool to list features or highlight information. But if there is a bullet list in every section, the reader will get lost. Moreover, this stops being a blog post and becomes a very bad infographic. If you want to list information with bullet points, at least put the extra effort into building a proper infographic. Check out what proper formating should look like:

Highlight key points

This being said, don’t shy away from highlighting the most important parts of your text. In general, these are the exceptions. We talked about single sentences or single-word paragraphs. We spoke about bolding, underlining, and italicizing. But when it comes to highlighting, you must use visual hierarchy to your full advantage.

Make sure all your key points are visually distinguishable. Make them look appealing and easily skimmable. You can do that by using bullet points and listings, and if there is something you want your audience to remember, then it’s time to use single-sentence paragraphs. Make sure this is the one thing you want your audience to remember, as there is a place for only one such paragraph.

Use keywords but in moderation

This is the part where content writers usually get on edge with the SEO team. The SEO team wants to follow protocol. They want to add as many keywords as possible in a single text. Google will love this. Your readers will hate it. Stuffing keywords everywhere in bulk shows you are more interested in Google than your readers, and they will quickly become frustrated. Moreover, this makes you look condescending, which is not a great look if you want to win hearts.

Break the tension with visuals

Usually, lengthy texts are heavy. Readers feel exhausted and often lose concentration. That’s inevitable, especially if you are trying to explain complex concepts. So, instead of skipping on vital information, a much better strategy is offering some tension relief.

The best way to do so is by adding a picture, a video, or another visual. Graphics often help illustrate your point while at the same time relieving the reader’s eyes of the text.

Many writers use humor to break the tension, and that’s a great idea on paper. However, jokes must be done extremely carefully, and you must have established your brand persona and brand voice as such. You can’t be all serious and place a deadpan joke out of nowhere.

So, if you are not sure if you can pull off a joke persona without offending or alienating part of your audience, just stick to the classics. Provide your audience with a visual tension break in the form of pictures or videos.

Don’t over-link

When creating your blog post, remember you are not Wikipedia, so not every sentence must contain 3-4 links. Links are a delicate art. Naturally, when you are citing someone, it’s common courtesy to link them in your text. Moreover, linking authoritative websites will give you an SEO boost.

However, this can’t be your entire content strategy. You must provide your readers with something more – to build upon existing information. Furthermore, you don’t want to divert your audience from your website. You want them glued to your page for as long as possible.

Naturally, links can’t be completely avoided. That’s what building a proper backlink portfolio is all about. However, be sure never to link your competitors or divert your audience to another website unless absolutely necessary. For example, when offering statistics.

Forget about clickbait headlines

Ten years ago, clickbait was huge when content writers used every method to gain traction and be ahead of their competitors. Today, that certainly doesn’t work. On the contrary, making your headline sound clickbait-ish is off-putting, as internet users were burned one too many times, falling for false promises. So, while headlines like “10 content strategies that you won’t believe will work (but they do)” might have worked back in 2013, today, they are avoided like the plague.

The same goes for elevating the anticipation of the readers to unbelievable heights. So, avoid headlines that promise “Unique,” “Never before seen,” or “100% fail proof…” even if you actually can fulfill your promise.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you should put only dry and unimaginative headlines. Using powerful adjectives is definitely a good idea. Still, make sure that you can deliver what you promise. For instance, if you want to make the clickbait-ish headline we used for an example above into a readable blog post headline, you can transform it to “10 powerful content strategies to help you grow your audience”. The difference is obvious. You can see some additional examples in the picture below:

Get to the point straight away

Whenever you want to find out something, you don’t want to read through a boring 500-word-long introduction of the problem. You want a fast and clear answer. Then, if you have the time, you can read the detailed explanations. So, when writing a blog post, try to stick to the point from the very top.

Go straight to the topic and provide an answer right from the beginning. Naturally, topics like this don’t answer a specific question but offer a step-by-step tutorial on improving your content. So, obviously, we can’t give an answer in the intro itself. However, if we are talking about “Is SEO worth investing in?”, the resounding “Yes” should be in the first sentence. Then, you can explain why you think so.

Give your text a flow

Most importantly, your text must have a flow. This will help your readers follow it much more easily, making it a better read in general. Placing just facts without any context will give the information, but what will set you apart from everyone else in your industry is the entertainment and readability value of your content. So, structure your text soundly, use transitional phrases and words, avoid plot holes, and don’t be afraid to use pronouns. Make sure your next section starts where the previous one ended.

Your website readability starts way before you create your blog post.

There is a simple truth. A blog post is only good when the website it is on is well-maintained. This includes the load time, the up-time, and the security of your website. Even if you follow our advice to the letter and you manage to create a masterpiece of a blog post, it will all be in vain if users can’t reach it half the time. The loading speed is just as instrumental to your success as your content, as people don’t wait for a website to open. They simply move to the next one.

So, if you want to avoid this uncomfortable situation, you must find a great web hosting provider. HostArmada is just what you are looking for. We offer lightning-fast load speed, 99.9% guaranteed uptime, and top-notch security. Check out our plans and find the one that best fits your business needs.

Remember, a fast, secure, and reliable website is always the first step toward your business success.