Anyone can start a blog these days, but success is far from guaranteed.
Why? Because there’s a lot more involved in blogging than just your writing skills. The design, quality of the content, and the way you write blog posts all play a role in the success of your blog.
Readability is a crucial factor for improving the user experience of your blog. By making your blog posts easier to digest, you’ll attract and retain more readers, and be able to grow a broader audience around your blog.
If you’re looking to build a successful blog, then optimizing the readability of your blog posts is crucial. We have a few tips that will help you achieve that goal and offer a smooth experience for your readers.
How can you improve readability?
Simply put, readability is all about making your content easier to read and understand for the end users. This includes proper formatting, use of fonts, grammar, writing style, and more.
Readability is something that’s still being ignored by many, including professional journalists who try to show their skills of academic writing.
For example, try reading the text in the screenshot below and see if it makes you want to learn more from that press release.
How many times did you yawn trying to read those paragraphs? Terrible formatting, lack of sub-headlines, and long paragraphs make this a perfect example of poor readability.
If you’re still writing your blog posts like this, then you need to make some changes to your writing style and the way you format blog posts.
Follow these simple tips to start optimizing your blog for readability.
#1 Use sans serif font
Improving your blog readability begins with the font and the font size you’re using for the text.
First, pick the right font for your blog posts. Sans serif fonts are much easier to read than serif fonts, which include fancy tails and uneven strokes for styling the text.
Also, make sure to pick the right font size. Your readers shouldn’t have to zoom in on your blog posts just to read its content. Make your text easier to read without having to use a magnifying glass.
A simple way to find a great font pairing is to use the WhatFont Chrome extension. With this tool, you can visit any blog and find out what kind of font and font sizes the blog uses.
Switching fonts is easy if you’re using WordPress. Many WordPress themes allow you to quickly choose from free fonts available on Google Fonts database and customize the font size for paragraphs and headlines separately.
#2 Analyze blog posts with Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is more than just a plugin for optimizing websites for search engines. It also helps you optimize your blog posts for readability by analyzing your content. Then the plugin suggests specific ways to improve readability.
Also, you can use writing tools like Hemingway to improve your formatting and grammar.
You can also test the readability of the other parts of your blog using similar plugins. For example, OptinMonster allows you to test your email opt-in forms with A/B split testing to improve lead generation rates. You can use it to test different images, fonts, and font sizes with your opt-in forms to figure out what works the best.
#3 Keep paragraphs short
Write short paragraphs that are no longer than three sentences to make your blog posts easier to digest. This is a rule most expert marketers follow to improve the readability of their blog posts.
Visit the blogs of experts like Noah Kegan and Brian Dean and see for yourself. Notice how often they use single sentence paragraphs to avoid clutter.
This strategy not only improves readability with clean formatting, but it also makes reading blog posts more enjoyable for your users.
#4 Use lots of images
What do images have to do with readability? Quite a lot.
Images play a significant role when it comes to making text easier to understand. In fact, studies have found that articles with lots of images get 94% more visitors than the articles without images.
Neil Patel is a famous blogger who uses this strategy on his blog. All of his blog posts are filled with images. The success of this blog is more than enough to prove that it works.
Today, it’s easier to find free images than ever before. There are plenty of stock photo sites that lets you download and use high-quality stock photos for free. Make the most of them and start adding more visuals to your blog posts.
#5 Develop a conversational writing style
Leonardo da Vinci once said, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
Using dictionary words and heavy technical terms doesn’t make your writing look any more professional. But, if you’re able to simplify your content and make it easier to understand, you’ll be able to reach more people through your blog posts.
The best way to simplify your blog posts is to write your content in a conversational tone. When writing, try to imagine that you’re speaking or explaining something to your best friend and write the content using the same words you would use in such a conversation.
As a result, your blog posts will offer a more engaging and personalized experience for your readers while also making them feel like you’re honestly speaking from your heart.
Improve readability on your blogs and post-click landing pages
In addition to following these tips, you can explore some of the successful blogs run by the experts. See how they format their blog posts. Take note on the analogies and references they use to keep readers entertained.
If you’re looking to improve your post-click landing page conversions, sign up for an Instapage Enterprise demo today.
Practice makes perfect. Keep writing, reading, and practicing your craft and you will get better at writing engaging posts and pages in no time.
Author Bio:
Syed Balkhi is an award-winning entrepreneur and co-founder of OptinMonster, a powerful conversion optimization software. He is also the founder of Awesome Motive the company behind several popular small business software that collectively powers over 3 million websites and serves billions of page views every month.