Many SEO and content tools give readability recommendations related to something called a Flesch Reading Ease score. But how much attention should you pay to it? What is it really good for? Can a better readability score help you rank better? In this article, you’ll learn the answers to these questions with conclusions backed up by our mini-study of 15,000 keywords. But before we get to the nitty gritty, let’s make sure we’re on the same page. What is Flesch Reading Ease? Does Flesch Reading Ease score affect Google rankings? Should you optimize your content based on the Flesch Reading Ease score? Notes about methodology What is Flesch Reading Ease? Flesch Reading Ease (FRE) is a way to score the readability of text. The scores range between 1 and 100, with higher scores deemed easier to read. Here’s the Flesch Reading Ease score formula: You’ll probably never need to calculate this yourself but keep in mind its two variables: the length of your sentences and words. The longer your words and sentences are on average, the lower your FRE score. Does Flesch Reading Ease score affect Google rankings? In 2018, John Mueller from Google said he’s not aware of any algorithms that use basic readability scores. And since FRE is pretty basic with just two variables at play, it wouldn’t really make much sense to use it. So no, readability scores like FRE don’t directly affect rankings. This is backed up by our study of 15,000 keywords, which found virtually zero correlation between rankings and FRE scores. The workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on. Clicks are the number of clicks coming to your website’s URL from organic search results. So then, why do so many SEO and content tools show this score? The answer is because FRE is a proxy for readability, and readability is obviously important. It can influence user experience—something that’s become more and more important in SEO over the years. If searchers find your content hard to read and understand, they’ll probably leave. This leads to negative user experience signals like a low dwell time, time on page, and a high bounce rate, which may signal to Google that your page isn’t a great result. Even worse, because fewer visitors actually end up consuming the content, fewer people will link to it—and we know that backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors.