Spoke
Readability and formatting
Readability tools count syllables and sentence lengths and hand you a grade level. Writing to that number produces prose that scores well and reads badly.
No platform publishes a readability target or threshold. The typography recommendations are long-standing practice supported by accessibility standards.
Readability tools count syllables and sentence lengths, then hand you a grade level.
Write to that number and you reliably produce prose that scores well and reads badly, because the number is a proxy and it's a weak one.
Does readability affect SEO?
Not as a documented ranking factor. No platform publishes a readability score or threshold.
It does affect whether people stay, understand and act, which matters commercially regardless of ranking — and matters more as fewer visits arrive from a page of ten links. But writing to a readability score is the wrong response. The gains come from structure and typography, not from using shorter words.
What actually helps
Line length. Sixty to seventy-five characters is the single biggest comprehension improvement available, and it's a CSS property. Long lines make the eye lose its place coming back.
Contrast and size. Light gray body text is a design trend that costs comprehension. We measure every color pair against its WCAG requirement and publish the numbers, which is a low bar that a lot of sites miss.
Paragraph length. Three or four sentences. Not because long paragraphs are wrong, but because a wall of text gets skipped by somebody deciding in two seconds whether this page is worth it.
Space. Room around headings and between sections does more than any word-level change you could make.
Structure where it's structured
Match the form to the shape the content actually has. A sequence is a numbered list. A set is bullets. A comparison across attributes is a table.
The counterweight, because this advice gets over-applied: reasoning is prose. An argument chopped into bullets loses the connective tissue that made it an argument and leaves you with a document that looks organized and says less.
Match structure to content. Don't maximize bullets.
Jargon
Write for your reader, not for a grade level.
If your audience uses a term every day, using it is clarity and avoiding it is condescension. If they might not, define it once on first use and move on.
The failure isn't jargon. It's unexplained jargon mixed with explanations of things the reader already knows — which is what happens when nobody decided who the page was for.
We auto-link defined terms on first mention for that reason. Define once, link afterward, never re-explain.
What the scores can't see
Whether the page is organized in the order the reader needs.
A page can score beautifully and still bury the answer in the fourth section, make you read three paragraphs of setup before anything useful, or save the key qualification for the end.
Those are structural failures no formula detects. They're also the ones that actually make people leave.
More in On-page & content
Keyword placement
The most superstition-heavy topic in the field. Here's the small amount that holds up, and the large amount that doesn't.
Headings & structure
Most people pick heading levels by how big they render. They're a document outline, and the difference shows up for exactly the readers you care about.
Internal linking
Isolated pages chasing isolated keywords lost their value slowly and then all at once. What replaced them is depth, and the mechanism is your internal links.
Titles & descriptions
These are the only part of your page most people will ever see. A decade of advice about character counts has crowded out the one question that matters.
Depth & intent
Depth is not length. It is whether somebody who arrived with a question can leave without needing another page — and intent is the thing most content gets wrong before a word is written.