Get your business website found on Search Engines with the Flesch score

Why should you consider checking your content Flesch score?

The Flesch score is a measure of how easy it is to understand written content. It is one of the ways that search engines calculate how important your website is to its audience. Tweaking your content to improve your Flesch score can improve your SEO, and help get your business found online more quickly.

How to use the flesch scoring system to improve your content for SEO

This article will help you to write better content for your website.  If you have better content search engines will rank your business higher. It’s as simple as that. 

1. What is a Flesch score?
2. The history of Google and the Flesch score
3. Essential techniques to improve your Flesch score for your articles
4. How to use your articles to push your business website higher in search engines
5. How to get more leads from your website by using the Flesch score

What is a Flesch Score?

Flesch scores indicate how easy it is to read a piece of content. The Flesch score is between 1 and 100. 

In the US education system, there is also a Flesch Kincaid Grade Level. They are both calculated with the same units but have different formulas:

Interested in the Kincaid Grade Level? Read more at the readable website where they explain more on the flesh-kincaid score

How do the scores stack up

90-100 Very easy to read, easy for an 11-year-old student

80-90 Easy to read

70-80 Fairly easy to read

60-70 Easily understood by 13 to 15 year old students

50-60 Fairly difficult to read

30-50 Difficult to read, best for college graduates

0-30 Very difficult to read, best for university graduates

The history of Google and the Flesch score

Some context on this subject, in September 2010, Google enabled users to filter search results on three levels of reading level: 

• Advanced
• Intermediate
• Basic

This enabled users of Google to find the content that suited their reading ability. As an example, if a student was studying and needed information to understand a complex problem, they could filter search results pages by how easy it was to understand the content.

We know that:

• December 2010 - Google was ranking website content on its own Flesch scoring system.
• May 2015 dropped readability from advanced search filters. 

The question is why do we believe it still plays a significant part in the way that Google ranks content and webpages on its search pages? 

TIP From the internal research carried out at RACER Marketing, we have found articles that have performed the best for SEO have a Flesch Score of between 55-65. Articles that have been written that conform to this score have contributed to pushing websites to the top of the search results pages.

Essential techniques to improve your Flesch score for your articles

When we write or review content for our SEO clients we use some of these tools to check the readability of the content.

1. https://www.webfx.com/tools/read-able/
2. https://readable.com/
3. https://www.online-utility.org/english/readability_test_and_improve.jsp

TIPS:

1. Keep paragraphs wherever possible to two sentences 
2. Brevity, brevity, brevity - use concise and exact use of words in writing in your copy
3. Chunk your content and break it up with headings
4. Start with telling the reader what you are going to tell them
5. Close your document by summarising what you have told them
   

How to use your articles to push your business website higher in search engines

Once you have got your Flesch score just right, don’t forget its purpose. Remember the intent of your audience. Are they looking for technical information, but also interested in the solutions your business has to offer them? 

Link to other pages on your website from the article by using relevant keywords. For example are you interested in SEO services in London? 

See what I did there? I used part of the sentence that was relevant to a service we offer our clients and linked to it.

TIP Remember to only link to services and articles that have a common thread between the article you have written and the problem your service solves.

How to get more leads from your website by using the Flesch score

Remember applying the Flesch score test to your product or services pages will increase the conversion rates of your website. Getting benefit copy higher up the page with two sentences per paragraph will make your copy easier to read and will increase the chances of people buying from you.