One of the SEO factors that people still do not understand very well is the readability level of a web page. The truth is that this factor can actually have a fairly significant affect on the ranking of your individual web pages, and your entire website. However, why does readability level make an impact on your rankings and what is the ideal readability that you should trying to go for?

The readability of your website has an affect on your SEO value because it changes the way that visitors interact with your webpage. For example, let’s assume you are writing a technical explanation for a piece of software. If the readability level, or reading grade level of your writing is too low, your targeted visitors are going to instantly assume your website has nothing to offer and they will click on the back button.

Conversely, if you are writing something about a fan page for a children’s TV show or cartoon, and you are writing with a reading level that is too high, kids won’t understand what you’re talking about and they will click on the back button as well. In other words, the way you write changes the way that visitors view your website.

If they can understand and still find it valuable and useful, they will stick around your site. If they don’t for either reason, then they will only visit the one page on your site, which means they end up as a bounce. Your bounce rate is a strong measure of how well you provide people with what they are looking for, and how well your content matches people’s expectations about what they are trying to find.

Google and the other major search engines take the bounce rate of your web pages and factor that into how valuable your web pages are as a whole. So the lower your bounce rate, the more valuable your page is to those that find it, and the higher you will be ranked as a result because people finding your webpage view it as a successful find.

This means that the readability or reading level of a website is individual, it should be targeted to your specific audience. There is no such thing as the perfect reading level, regardless of how advanced or basic that is. It’s all about playing to your audience you’ll end up with lower bounce rates, and therefore higher rankings.

So what ultimately affects the reading level of your content? The two main factors to consider here are the length of your sentences and paragraphs, and the complexity of the words you use. Shorter sentences and shorter paragraphs generally signal a lower reading grade level, and larger words of course signal a higher reading level.

The way that readability or the reading grade level of a website affects your SEO is still to be determined in terms of its exact effect. However, what is clear is that it will directly impact your bounce rate, which is a strong metric for how well your site fares with visitors. Since bounce rate is used by the search engines as another means of ranking your website, your readability level does in fact directly have an impact on your search engine marketing.