Resource for Checking Your SEO Content Readability

There was an interesting idea in the post I stumbled across last week that the readability level may affect your rankings because…

from a logical standpoint, having reading level as a ranking factor among the search engines just makes sense. It’s a good way to match the right content with the right audience.

I never did any testing to confirm that, nor was readability check ever part of my SEO process but it does make sense. So in case you ever need to find out how readable your content is, let me offer you a one-stop overview of readability level checkers and comparison tools.

Readability Level Tests

A handy tip: if you are not in the USA (like myself) and it takes some serious effort to translate the US grade system, U.S. grade level 1 corresponds to age 6, and in general adding 5 to the grade level gives an estimate of the typical reader’s age.

The page I was playing with to try readability level checkers: NYTimes article. So let’s take a look at readability tools:

Free Readability Level Checking Tools

[I described some of the tools in more detail below]

Fog

Fog tool (as the name suggests) uses Gunning fog index to calculate the text reading level. The best things about the tool are:

• It highlights the “complex” words (those that have more than 3 syllables in blue);
• Marks separate sentences.

This looks really useful for visualizing “difficult” spots in your text to make it clear if you need any edits:

Readability score

Readability score is a nice way to compare all the listed readability tests (Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, Gunning-Fog Score, Coleman-Liau Index, SMOG Index, Automated Readability Index):

Edit Central

Edit Central is another handy tool that compares a number of readability tests, shows useful stats and also underlines complex words:

Juicy Studio Readability Test

Juicy Studio Readability Test displays some really useful page copy stats including average length of a sentence, complex words, etc:

Further reading and sources:

• Everything you should know about readability
• Wikipedia: readability tests