How Important is Readability to SEO?

How Important is Readability to SEO? It is very important for the following reasons:

#1: Schema

Semrush defines schema as “a structured data vocabulary that helps search engines better understand the info on your website in order to serve rich results. These markups allow search engines to see the meaning and relationships behind entities mentioned on your site. For this reason, schema markup has become a hot topic of SEO.”

The blog linked above also explains why Schema is important according to SQEG (Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines) and the most recent EAT Update (Expert, Authority, Trustworthiness)

How did I find this blog you ask? I found it via Rich Results!

How your data is structured directly correlates to how likely your content will be selected to appear in Google’s Rich Results. As you can see above google event highlighted the portion of the text it deemed as high quality information. How? Because the data was structured in a way that made it easily transferrable to rich results:

#2: UX UI (AKA User Interface and User Experience)

If you’re dividing your content using correct spacing and various Header tags, it just makes the content easier to consume.

For more info on why/how to use header tags, I’m going to defer to Amelia Willson from over at Search Engine Journal because she does it more justice than I could. Just know that you can find those header tag options by clicking here in WordPress:

Here’s what they look like (H2)

H3

H4

H5

Make sure when you’re selecting your theme, you choose a theme with H tags you think will fit well with the aesthetic of your website. After all, you’re going to be using them pretty often!

#3: Yoast!

Yoast SEO has a readability section in their in-post screen element if you’re using WordPress. It’s always important to Yoast when you’re writing any type of content since their machine learning directly correlates to SEO best practices. Additionally, it’s impossible to remember all of the various SEO & readability rules. Why make it harder on yourself? Here’s what this blog looks like from a readability standpoint:

I hope this blog gave you some valuable insight on how to optimize your blog from a readability POV. In a post-EAT world, this will become increasingly important for someone adopting a holistic SEO strategy.

If you have questions about our SEO strategy, contact us today!