Here’s how to write readable content

Recently, I’ve written articles here about balancing four facets of content writing:

• Findability, the process of getting your content discovered online.
• Clickability, the psychology of convincing your readers to click on your ads or search engine results.
• Readability, the art of making your content interesting and engaging, and
• Usability, the physiological science of making sure people can actually consume your content.

That’s a lot of balls to juggle.

And I’m not going to lie to you—finding the perfect balance isn’t easy.

I’ve been a writer for almost 20 years and I still struggle with it. Constantly.

But here’s some good news—for readability, at least. By focusing on just a few techniques, you can drastically improve the readability of your content.

Think about readers first.

Search engines reward businesses for creating valuable content that helps readers. Counterintuitively, the easiest way to earn those rewards is to forget about the search engines in the first place.

Write your draft exclusively for humans, then add subtle search engine tweaks afterward.

Don’t worry about how many times you use a keyword on a page.

Once upon a time, people counted instances of a keyword and measured that number against the total number of words on the page. The result was called “keyword density,” and it was the stuff of endless debate. Was 5% too high? Was 1.5% too low?

These days, that number is less important—what matters most is using keywords naturally. Remember that you’re writing for humans, then give them your material like you would at a TED Talk. If you let your expertise shine through naturally, the keywords will follow.

Love your thesaurus.

I don’t think I need to tell anyone that search engines are a lot smarter these days than they used to be. For example, they know that—to most searchers—“content marketing” and “content strategy” are the same thing. (They’re not, but that’s another story.)

You can use that fact to your advantage by writing with synonyms; the result will feel incredibly natural to your readers, but search engines won’t be able to escape the clear signals about your page’s topic.

In other words, focus less on trying to jam “real estate Tuscon” into your content, and more on simply talking about Little Town, Drexel Heights, and the Catalina Foothills.

The takeaway

Yes, your content needs to be good enough to attract attention from search engines

But it also needs to be written for the human on the other end of the web browser.

Because if your content doesn’t make sense, your readers will “vote with their mouse” and leave—and search engines watch those signals.

More and more, content that doesn’t connect with readers is considered “bad.” So if you’re not doing your job on readability, there’s no way you’ll be able to hold on to any search engine rankings you might have achieved in the first place.