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How to Write a Highly Readable Article?

Mar 10, 2021

Do you or your company create content?

It’s a highly nuanced game, isn’t it?

First, you have to find which type of content worth creating, create it, and then wait for people to give it attention and actually read it.

As a writer myself, I know that the most frustrating part is the waiting.

It’s always rough when you find out the piece that you spent two days writing got less than ideal click-through-rates.

It kills motivation faster than anything.

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What are the strategies to make yourself accessible to your readers?

We have broken down our top strategies into actionable steps to up your click-through-rates.

What do your readers want to read?

Which questions do they need answers to?

Which concepts are they interested in?

The way we like to find out which topics are actually relevant to our visitors is by using Answerthepublic, Quora, and Reddit.

By using these websites to scope out what our target audience is talking about, we are able to curate different types of engaging content that add value to them.

What story does your audience care about? What is your message?

How are you exemplifying this?

Headlines

The easiest and most effective way to exemplify this is by creating headers that actually suits your writing content.

By creating an effective headline your audience is immediately more likely to click on your post.

When it comes to people, as much as they say they don’t judge a book by its cover, they do.

For example, in 1982, Naura Hayden, an author and model who worked in the entertainment industry released a book called “Astro-Logical Love”.

The book did terribly.

From the audience’s perspective, it just looks like another wannabe self-help book.

It was then republished under the name, “How to Satisfy a Women Every Time… And Have Her Beg for More.”

The book republished under this new title, with just slightly added content and the same author, went on to sell more than 2.5 million copies.

You can tell the difference it made.

It addressed the reader’s motivation, which makes them want to read the content.

I rest my case.

The key component to developing good headlines is to make sure you’re really addressing the key point of your article within it.

It takes time, effort, and practice.

It does not reflect your ability by any means.

We recommend our Headline Kit for a crash course on how to write good headlines.

The-headline-kit-on-device

Now that users have clicked on your article, how do we make sure they stay?

In order to decrease your bounce rate, you need to make sure they actually like your content.

The first way to ensure that is to look into your content itself.

Is it legible?

You may have written your content with confidence, all in a beautiful writing style that you are proud of, and a tone that your audience relates to, but does it matter if your audience can’t comprehend it.

One of the techniques to check that is by looking into Flesch Reading-Ease Test.

Dr. Rudolf Flesch noticed that some language (especially legal language) seems “designed to make reading as difficult as possible.”

The sentences are long, the words are arcane, and simple things look complex.

Flesch wanted to show this in a concrete fashion.

So, by studying all kinds of writing, he developed a formula to determine readability.

In 2021, Flesch’s method remains the most popular way to determine readability.

J. Peter Kincaid added a grade-level calculation to Flesch’s formula.

That’s why you might also see it referred to as the Flesch-Kincaid score.

This test rates text on a 100-point scale.

The higher the score, the easier it is to understand the document.

For most standard files, you want the score to be between 60 and 70.

The formula for the Flesch Reading Ease score is: 206.835 – (1.015 x ASL) – (84.6 x ASW) where: ASL = average sentence length (the number of words divided by the number of sentences) ASW = average number of syllables per word (the number of syllables divided by the number of words)

You can find the score of your document via Word Documents.

By doing this you can ensure that readability and comprehension by the audience of your original content/posts are good.

Next, you need to make sure you are using white space effectively.

A mistake people make often is not thinking about it at all.

When an audience is flooded with too much information their natural behavior is to feel overwhelmed.

Formatting truly is key when it comes to communication via screens.

Design, structure, and format, play a huge role in user experience.

One of the reasons is because if users find it hard to comprehend the article, they’ll decide not to read it, therefore increasing your bounce rate.

The best way to prevent this is to make sure you’re using your white space efficiently.

Make sure to have gaps between large portions of texts.

Use bulleted lists to list items instead of dumping them into large paragraphs.

The advantage of this is that it makes it easier for readers to comprehend as well as the fact that it breaks up chunks of text without losing its meaning.

But how do you get Google to like your content/posts?

Use Search Engine Optimisation.

There are many keyword tools available to help you calculate your topic score.

We at LEAD use Frase.

On Frase, you can find keyword ideas to increase the keyword density of your type of content.

These keywords should be used in your title, headers, introductions, and conclusions.

Frase is an AI application that reviews your work in comparison to your competitor’s in order to tell you which keywords to add in to optimize your content further and therefore get a higher topic score than your competitors.

This is why marketers find it so important.

Post writing your piece of content, focus on your SEO.

SEO helps Google find your work, find it influential, and show your work more which in turn increases your engagement.

Find more insights on SEO for both photos and content on our blogpost.

You will find in-depth instructions on how to curate your posts to suit your SEO needs further.

By using SEO you are more likely to make a connection with your audience and therefore, increase interactions.

There you go!

Here are our strategies to write a highly readable article.

We hope you found it helpful.

For any questions or guidance please email us at mailto:chelsea@thelead.io .

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