Improve Readability Of Your Blogs With These 6 Writing Tips
Blogging is a great marketing tool for businesses to ensure more visibility for their brands online. As a business owner, for you, blogs serve as a channel to talk about your products and services in detail to your audience. Besides helping you to connect with your target audience by providing them with the information they’ve been looking for, this medium also helps you to market your brand among your target client group. That’s one big reason why many businesses have taken to blogging on their websites and other publishing platforms. And therefore, it becomes imperative that you make your business blog appealing for your audience to hold their attention for a longer span. How do you do that? By providing your audience a balanced mix of textual and visual information through your blogs. But if your blog posts read sloppy or are too hard to comprehend, chances are that your blog will lose its credibility, and your readers won’t scroll beyond the first few lines. That would just mean that all your efforts in creating captivating visuals and engaging content have failed to yield the desired results. And a high bounce rate is not the kind of response you want from your blog! Because that would negatively impact the SEO health of your blog and website. And we don’t want any of that. What we want is to help you improve readability of your blogs. Therefore, in this blog, we bring you 6 simple tips to better the readability of your blogs and impress your audience. Take a look!
Why Improve Readability Of Your Blog
The readability of your piece depends on communicating your ideas in a clear and comprehensible manner. And, there are a number of reasons why you might want to make your blogs readable. Let’s start with the fact that most people these days are busy, and therefore, might lack the time to decode all those complex sentences and look up a dictionary several times while reading a single write-up. If readers find your blog difficult to read, they might just move on to the next resource available to gather the same information. And for you, that’s a huge opportunity lost. This could even give your competitors an edge over you in terms of impressing the audience, getting brand recognition, and boosting their recall value.
While easy readability of a content might not be a parameter to rank your blogs for search engines, a higher exit rate, bounce rate, time spent on the page, and overall audience engagement with your blog are some of the factors that could affect a blog’s rankings – and therefore deserve your attention.
Top 6 Tips To Improve Readability of Your Blogs
1. Keep Your Sentences Short & Simple
A winding maze of complicated sentences could confuse your readers, leading them to lose their interest in your piece. So, we suggest you try focusing on conveying a single idea in one sentence. Remember those grammar lessons from school on simple, compound, and complex sentences? Now’s the time to apply that knowledge! If you need to talk about several things in one paragraph, the ideal way of doing that would be using short sentences to express your thoughts. Try to introduce a new idea in a fresh sentence. This could help you make your text more comprehensible. You can take the help of editing tools such as Grammarly or Hemingway Editor to check the readability score of your copy. These applications can detect long and winding sentences and highlight them for you. Depending on the need of the situation, you could then rephrase the sentences and break them into shorter ones.
2. Work On Punctuations
A wrongly placed punctuation could completely alter the meaning of a sentence. Looking for an example? Let’s consider this – “Let’s eat, grandma” vs “Let’s eat grandma”. While one is a polite suggestion, the other is outright horrific! Now, you know what we are talking about? Punctuation failures could lead to some comic relief, but they could also end up conveying a completely different meaning than what was intended. Therefore, pay attention to punctuations. Because these are markers that help you guide your readers through the written text. Besides, they help you break your sentences into shorter ones. And, if you do need to resort to longer sentences in some cases, punctuations could help you convey to the readers where to stress in a sentence, where to pause, and even convey the tone of your sentence.
3. Use Simple Words
As a simple rule of writing – the more syllables your words will have, the more difficult they will be to read. You can easily avoid using a word with 4 syllables if the one with 2 syllables fits well in your sentence. Consider that not everyone would have an extensive vocabulary and might prefer simpler words in a blog so that they understand your ideas easily. To find easier alternatives of difficult words, you could simply Google the synonyms. And continuous research and writing could even help you build an excellent vocabulary and better your writing skills.
Suggested Read: How to Create a Photography Blog in 6 Easy Steps
4. Write To Your Audience
This is probably one of the most important tips we could give you for improving the readability of your blogs. Know your audience well before you begin writing for them. Learn about their lifestyle, their professional make-up, and their reading preferences. That would help you capture the imagination of your target audience through your writing. Once you know the pulse of your audience, it would be easier for you to put your ideas into words – and use the right jargon, if needed. For example, if you are writing for fellow photographers, they’d understand certain terms common to the field of photography and may even appreciate your piece for its technical details. If your target audience comprises couples instead, then you might want to avoid using such technical jargon and consider putting across your point in simple terms.
5. Follow One Style Throughout
So you are a prolific writer and can effortlessly dabble in different styles of writing. Great! But is your audience as receptive to your varying writing styles? While you might want to explore multiple writing techniques, be sure not to ruin your user experience due to experimenting with the tone and style of your writing. Choose a writing style that you’d want to follow throughout your blog. Whether you are having a dialog with your audience, resorting to the question-answer format, or simply sharing your experience, try sticking to one consistent style. For example, if you were to interview a couple to learn about their love story and wedding vision, be consistent with the format where you pose the questions and they respond to those questions. If, however, you pick the style where you share your experience, then you’d have to share your perspective on a topic and your take on it as a photographer. You could even go ahead and structure your content in the form of a list, just like the one we’ve used here to convey different ideas related to one topic.
6. Use Subheadings
Just like you break your sentences into shorter ones, dividing your blog into sections with the help of subheadings could also improve readability. Think of it as segregating your piece into categories for easy comprehension. This would not only make your piece simple to grasp for your audience, but dividing your content under subheads and bullet points would also help you break the monotony. Subheadings are also a good way to make your content look visually appealing and free of clutter. And less clutter means better readability. This could, in turn, make your readers spend more time on your blog and improve your search engine rankings.
Further Read: Blog Topics for Photographers: 5 Ideas to Engage your Audience
Improving the readability of your blogs is not a very difficult thing to do. With our tips to guide you and some conscious effort, you could easily shape your written pieces into those that are simple and lucid. What’s important here is the user experience. You could be already doing all the hard work by looking for relevant topics, researching, writing, and frequently uploading new blogs with some gorgeous images. Ensuring that your content tops the readability chart would be a cherry on the cake and could eventually help your brand shine online.
At Fotoskribe, we aim to help businesses like yours grow their online presence by delivering smart and meaningful content that engages your audience. And we do it in a way that gets Google’s attention.
For more information on how we can help – check out our pricing plans.