The Connection Between Readability and SEO And each different point is weighted differently to achieve the overall rating. Your main score is a culmination of how readable your content is overall, not how perfectly you met each benchmark. Here’s possibly the most important tip: you don’t need each criterion to be green in order to get an overall green score. Looks helpful, right? It is! Note, though, if you use the plain text tab to write and edit rather than the rich text one or Gutenberg, this feature will not work. For the criteria with an orange or red bullet, you’ll see recommendations for improvements.īy clicking the eye icon to the right of the Yoast readability suggestion, you can highlight the issue in the text to find it easily. The score checks different criteria, rates each one individually, and then combines the ratings into one main score. It also rates the way it flows, using transition words and so on. It factors in everything from sentence length to the use of headers, and it involves how accessible the syntax and vocabulary is. The Yoast SEO Readability Score is a measure of how easy it will be for users to read and understand your content. It’s in the sidebar for the Gutenberg editor and at the end of the post in the classic one.

In addition to those single color codes, Yoast also displays detailed analysis in a metabox right in the editor page. The dots can be green (great job!), orange (meh, needs improvement), or red (uh-oh, we have some serious issues to fix). One of them is for the copy’s SEO score, and the other is the Readability Score. If you use the Yoast SEO plugin on WordPress (find out how to get started with Yoast here), you’ve probably seen those colored dots on the right side of the page or underneath the body copy.

The Yoast SEO Readability Score is a way to check your writing against best practices to have your content accessible to the majority of readers - and also to search engines. More than anything else, you want readers to grasp what you’re saying.

Instead, it’s about reaching and then keeping a wider audience by making your content easier to comprehend. Writing simple content isn’t about dumbing it down.

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