82% More Readers … in Five Minutes?
What if I told you that you could get 82% more readers for your key content? And it would cost you nothing more than a few minutes of your time.
You’d probably laugh. But this isn’t the fevered dream of a madman, it’s just good old-fashioned readability.
This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.
The Cost of Content
How much does your content cost you? If I had to guess, I’d say that, since you’re reading a blog post about content marketing on Medium, it’s not nothing. After all, it costs money to come up with and refine a content strategy. It costs money to do keyword research. It costs money to manage content production. It costs money to have a writer create something worth reading. It costs money to create all of the graphics that go with that content. It costs money to post and host that content. It costs money to push it out on your social channels. It costs money to monitor its performance, manage feedback and even to understand what benefit it brings to your business.
It all costs money. And that’s fine.
But if you’re going to spend all this hard-earned money, why would you not take every possible step to get the most out of that content?
What is “Readability”?
Readability is how you measure, objectively, how difficult something is to read. Now, readability formulas are not a panacea. Readability formulas don’t understand meaning, or irony, or subtlety. They can’t tell you if you used the right conjugation when talking about what your husband’s sister’s dog might have done to their neighbor’s lawn. They can’t help you with font legibility or contrast.
But what readability formulas do, very effectively, is tell you how easy or hard the average reader is going to find a piece of content to read. They can be used to spot the worst passages in a piece of text. They can be used to highlight long words and sentences, and to show where unusual or unfamiliar words are being used.
Most readability formulas take a piece of content and produce a grade level for that content. That grade level is equivalent to the amount of education your average reader will need to be able to easily read your content. So a grade level of 10 means that a reader will need to have completed 10 years of school to read what you’ve written.
If you’re writing for the general public, a grade level of 8 will mean that only around 85% of your potential audience will be able to read your content.
So How’s My Readability?
Well, that’s up to you to find out. We obviously have a personal favorite tool when it comes to readability analysis, but we’re not here to pitch the benefits of our awesome, world-changing software to you.
Instead, we thought we’d make ourselves useful. We analyzed the last few blog posts or contentful news items from each of the FTSE 100 on their main website, and this was the result:
As you might expect, there’s a wide range of scores for content. Every one of these articles or news items, though, was written by a huge organization and serves a purpose. But, surprisingly, less than 10% of the FTSE 100 are ensuring their content is readable by the general public.
Take a moment to digest that. Ove 90% of the FTSE 100 are not checking how hard their content is to read before they publish it.
And these aren’t pieces of content aimed at a highly technical audience, or including extensive technical language. Every piece of content we picked was aimed at a broad audience. Every piece of content was a blog post, an article, some news or an insight piece.
Especially concerning was the fifth grouping. That is content with a readability level of 12 or higher. That means that in order to read that content, someone is likely to need to be educated to degree level. That’s about a third of the population. In order words, that content — aimed at the public — has been written so utterly impenetrably that two in every three people is going to struggle to read it. What a waste of time and money.
Time for the Science!
When talking about the science behind readability, things can quickly get murky. After all, if you rewrite a piece of content to make sentences shorter and to replace long words with shorter ones, you don’t just change the mathematical readability score of the piece; you also necessarily change all those less measurable qualities — its evocativeness, its rhythm, and its pacing.
But there is still plenty we can look at. And perhaps the best place to start is with literacy, and specifically this amazing piece of literacy research (PDF) from the OECD. Most of the anglosphere is comparable for literacy, and the astonishing results of this piece of research are that, for those nations (including USA, UK, and Canada among others):
- Only 55% of the general public are literate to a “suitable minimum for coping with the demands of everyday life and work”
- Another 30% have a “low level of proficiency” and “can deal only with material that is simple, clearly laid out”.
- That’s a total of 85% who are “low level of proficiency” or better.
Slightly harder to measure is the direct effect of improving readability. But people have tried. One of the earliest efforts was Readability and Readership: A Controlled Experiment by Charles Swanson. In the 1940s, at the University of Iowa, Charles tested two pieces of text on an audience of students, and then asked a series of questions to determine how much they had understood and retained.
The harder of the two pieces scored a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 12, while the easier one scored a grade level of 5. And the results? The easier piece of content had 82% more readers read all the way to the end.
While the Swanson study itself was small, the conclusions seem to be in line with what we might expect given the literacy levels reported by the OECD.
More recently, people have analyzed business writing, and The State of Business Writing from 2016 is quite enlightening:
- Over 60% of readers describe what they are reading for work as “too long”, “unclear” or “poorly organized”
- Over 80% say that poorly written material is wasting their time
- The average time spent reading per week is 25.5 hours, of which email is 9.3 hours
With the sheer amount of content (188 million emails per minute) reaching our eyeballs and the tsunami of advertising (5,000 ads per day), it’s no wonder our attention spans are shrinking (down to 8 seconds from 12 (maybe) over a few years). Over 90% of all data produced by humans, in our entire history, was created in the last two years alone.
If nothing else, that should tell you three very important things. First, that everybody you communicate with is dealing with a deluge of incoming messages. Second, that the signal-to-noise ratio of that deluge is getting worse. And finally, that if you want your content to stand out from everything else, you’d better make it as easy as possible on your reader.
Your readers’ eyeballs work hard enough already; give them a break.
So the next time you are writing an email to a colleague, or a blog post for your website, or a grand essay exploring the history of the noble Blackadders, bear in mind that the person you are writing for is already inundated with content and usually annoyed at the quality of it. You have a short window of time to grab their attention, you are competing with a firehose of other content and messaging, and not every reader will have the same background and level of education.
So How Do I Get My 82% More Readers?
You’ve probably already noticed my sleight of hand, but you already have those readers. There’s a pretty good chance they just aren’t reading your content. So to make sure you make the most of your existing traffic, the first thing to do is to check the readability of your cornerstone content.
What happens next depends on your scores. If your content is scoring at grade level 12 or higher, it needs some urgent work! The good news is that you likely have great potential for improved performance from your content; the bad news is there is a lot to do. Edit your text to improve readability by shortening sentences and replacing complex words with simpler ones where possible.
If it scores a grade level of 8 or better, you’re doing a great job! There’s mileage in aiming for a grade level of 6 or so, but lower than that and your content’s quality will suffer. For the record, a grade level of 6 is roughly the same readability as the typical Man Booker Prize shortlist entry.
If you’re somewhere between those two extremes, then you should start to work towards lowering your readability level to around 8. That’s low enough that about 85% of the general public will be able to read what you are writing. While you’re working through your text looking at the long sentences and complex words, keep an eye out for other opportunities to improve. Replace adverbs where possible, swap passive voice for active, avoid clichés and hedge words, and use transition words to help the reader follow your train of thought.
There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. Practice good readability habits every time you write, and you’ll find your content always works a little bit harder for you, and every penny you spend on it goes just a little bit further.
(Finally, in case you were curious, this article has a Flesch-Kincaid Readability Grade Level of 7.9.)
