What is Flesch Reading Ease

What is Flesch Reading Ease

What is ‘Flesch Reading Ease’ and why is it important to SEO?

Flesch Reading Ease

The Flesch reading score tells you how difficult your text is to read. Flesch’s reading ease measures the textual difficulty of a text in English. The lower the score, the more difficult the text is.

Sentence length and the number of syllables per word are now part of the equation.

Short sentences and no words of more than two syllables will work.

 

Why is readability important for SEO?

It is unclear whether readability is an explicit ranking factor. Therefore we don’t know whether Google uses something like the Flesch score (or a variation for that matter) as a ranking factor in its algorithm. Either way, from a holistic SEOperspective, readability is very important.

If your text is too difficult, the text is too hard to read for your audience. This might scare off your audience and make them search for information elsewhere. A difficult text will result in a high bounce rate and this will lead to lower ranking in the long run. So, you should definitely make sure your texts are well written and not too difficult.

 

What does the Flesch reading ease test measure?

Flesch reading ease measures textual difficulty of a text in English. Since the release of Yoast SEO 3.5 we also provide reliable scores for Dutch and German.

The lower the score, the more difficult the text is. The Flesch readability score uses the sentence length (number of words per sentence) and the number of syllables per word in an equation to calculate the reading ease. Texts with a very high Flesch reading ease score (about 100) are very easy to read. They have short sentences and no words of more than two syllables. Usually, reading ease of 60-70 is believed to be acceptable/ normal for web copy.

 

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