Does Reading Level affect search engine SEO rankings?

Published on January 28, 2012 Does Reading Level affect search engine SEO rankings?

Late last year Google added a new filter to the advanced search tools displayed on a search page, called “Reading Level”. This lets search engine users sort pages in a website or on a topic by their level of complexity. What does this mean for the content of your online shopping website? Can it affect your search engine rankings?

Google’s official description provides the description of a high school teacher wanting to filter results for their students or someone still learning a language wanting to find easier to understand articles about a topic. Does this mean the tool is something that is taken into account for ranking articles in the search engines or is it just a useful tool for end users?

It’s our opinion that Google does take reading level into account for ranking pages, but differently for different search terms and topic areas. As with any written content, the better you can match your content to the potential audience reading it, the better it will help the end searcher find what they want and understand the message of the writer. Newspapers work on the basis that they aim to pitch reading level at a particular age, and many magazines and other media publications do too. Why wouldn’t Google take that into account, and why would they bother building calculation software and add it into their search engine for something that they wanted to have as just a nice little extra?

How is it calculated? According to Google, the reading level of a page was determined by asking a number of teachers to classify pages depending on their reading level and then determining a statistical model to rate any page the search engine comes across. Their exact formula for calculating reading level is therefore unknown, but there are many commonly available tools for calculating reading ease that you can use to check any page you have in your website already.

As an online shop will already have a particular target audience, the implications for your store of Reading Levels are:

• Unless your product is extremely complex, keep product descriptions clear, concise and unique. Pitch the level of content of your descriptions to the lowest general reading age of your target audience. Unless you are selling products that require a PhD to use and understand, you can only benefit from using simple sentences.
• Use Reading Age tools to check your content. If you have Microsoft Word, you can use the Spelling and Grammar Checker to give you a reading age on your content before you use it (but remember to cut and paste your content from Word to Notepad before copying and pasting it again into your site – Word adds a lot of nasty formatting commands to text behind the scenes). There are also online reading age tools that you can use.
• Check your static written content – are your policies easy to understand? Check common pages like the About Us? Shipping Page and other common text pages.
• If you have content aimed as “landing pages” from advertising (direct pages linked to from adverts or promoted), check the reading age too.

There are always new things to take into account when optimising your site for the search engines, but whatever you are looking at don’t forget the basics: have good quality content, make that content relevant to the main ways people will find your products, and build links to your site.