There have been some interesting discussions about how the readability level of your website can impact it’s effectiveness for both visitors and search engines.

On the usability side, it’s easy to see the impact. Having a readability level that is too high for your target audience limits their understanding of your products and services. They get frustrated and leave your site to find one that isn’t so confusing.

On the search engine side, the wrong readability level can cause trouble too. Visitors hitting your page and leaving quickly increases your bounce rates. When bounce rates are high, the search engines might decide that your web page isn’t very relevant for that keyword phrase and drop your ranking.

Additionally, comments in an article by The Search Agents suggest another impact. Readability levels are pretty easy to measure. Search engines could easily use that as one of the factors they consider when ranking pages.

Getting the right readability level can be tricky for industrial companies, especially those with complex products or a lot of technical language. This is why it’s so critical to really know your target audience – even down to knowing their reading level. Then you can tailor your site to visitor needs, keep them on your site longer, generate more leads, make more sales, and maybe even improve your search rankings.

Also, beware of using too much company jargon on your website. Jargon, although it makes perfect sense inside your company walls, confuses potential customers, and negatively impacts the readability of your site. Consider using professional copywriting when you want to clean up jargon.

If you want to find out how readable your website is, Ann Smarty has a great list of free tools to test readability levels. Test it out on your site and some sites that compete for the same keywords to see if you can see any correlation between readability and ranking.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 1:26 pm and is filed under Advanced SEO Concepts, Content & Copywriting, Usability & Conversions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.