Yoast SEO 17.2: Readability helps your audience understand

Did you know there are millions and millions of people with trouble reading? Did you know most people would probably read something that doesn’t strain their brain? The readability of content is an important factor for the success of that content. Yoast SEO comes with several tools that will help you improve readability. Plus, in Yoast SEO 17.2, you can also work on readability in the Farsi language.

How Yoast SEO helps you improve readability

For this release, we haven’t made any changes to the analyses, but we wanted to highlight them anyway. You’ll hear us talk about readability quite a bit. And that’s not without reason as your readers sure like content that’s easy to figure out. Making your content easy to read helps readers understand it better — and more quickly. It makes it easier for them to act upon. Simply because it will take them less time and energy to figure out what you mean.

Readable content is what we should all strive for. Everyone deserves that. By doing that, you are not simply dumbing down that content but opening it up to a much larger audience. But the hard part is that we all work on our own level. Dropping that level is not that easy for most people. It’s hard to lower that level that you’re so used to. Luckily, Yoast SEO helps you out.

Readability analysis in Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO comes with an advanced readability analysis that helps you improve the readability for your audience. For instance, it checks whether you use the passive voice too much. The passive voice can make sentences unnecessarily complex and hard to understand. The plugin looks at sentence length and helps you cut down on very long sentences. The same goes for the length of paragraphs. Yoast SEO also helps you to use enough transition words. These help with connecting sentences and concepts, making the text easier to understand.

By simply keeping an eye on the scores and using the feedback to improve your text, you are well on your way to readable content. If you want to learn more about improving your readability, get Yoast SEO Premium and you’ll also receive free access to the SEO copywriting training. Or, you can sign up for Marieke’s free readability workshop on September 23.

New in Yoast SEO 17.2

Some of the improvements in Yoast SEO 17.2 are focused on the Farsi language. We’ve completed the readability analysis for Farsi by adding the transition words, consecutive sentences, and passive voice assessments, and by adjusting the sentence length assessment to make it more appropriate for the Farsi language. In addition, we’ve improved keyword detection. We’re continually adding new languages to our language analyses.

Performance-wise, we’ve cleaned up indexables for posts with auto-draft post-status, in order to speed up your admin pages.

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One of the most important tools in Yoast SEO is the readability analysis. These writing tools help you to tone down your content and make it accessible for a larger audience. Readable content is awesome content!