Google & Reading Level: Develop Content That Informs Without Overwhelming
The primary goal of most law firm websites is to convert visitors to clients. Properly developed content can help with that conversion. A recent development at Google can help you determine what level of content you have on your site, and how accessible it is to your audience. On December 10th many of you may have read that Google added the ability to filter search results based upon their reading level. They announced this recently on their blog along with a few other interesting changes. You can filter by Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced reading levels. So for example if you were searching for some technical information, perhaps on a medical condition (reading up for a medical malpractice case perhaps) you would likely want to filter to see only “Advanced” level reading.
For most users, the Basic reading level will probably be too low, but this level might be great when looking for information for children (Google gives the example of reading material for elementary school classrooms). The Advanced reading level might be on the opposite end of the spectrum, much too complex for your average reader. Discussions about complex scientific processes or websites containing a lot of unusual or advanced terminology will likely be meant for a very niche audience of people searching specifically for this type of dialogue. As a law firm, you want to reach a large audience and convey your message, while still sounding authoritative about the types of litigation you handle. For this reason you should ideally target the Intermediate reading level.
Most of our law firm website content is written at the intermediate level to reach the large majority of readers. We want to convey information in an informative way, while demonstrating expertise in the subject matter to the reader. Some sites get carried away and become too advanced in their content, becoming Advanced level reading material. This type of writing is useful at times, but you want to be careful not to alienate your readers. If you filter results by the various reading levels, you will notice that your site may not appear in some reading levels. Take a look at some of the pages on your site that rank for a given term in Google, and then try to filter them by reading level to see where you stand.
For example, if we do a search on “Truck Accident Lawyer” and open the advanced search area to change the reading level, we will get different results for the various reading levels. One of our clients does not appear for the Basic and Advanced reading levels for that search, but they rank very well within the Intermediate level search.
(Click the thumbnail to the left for a better view.)
This is exactly where we want them to appear. The Intermediate level shows our readers expertise without alienating them by using complex terminology.
Obviously there will be exceptions to writing at this level. Some content will be intrinsically complex and using complex terms and concepts can’t be avoided. Some pages might have a very simple function and serve only a basic need on your site and may end up on the Basic reading level (“thank you” pages, or pages with very little content for example). Generally the Intermediate reading level is what you should strive for when developing content for your website to reach the most users and achieve the best rankings.
