Readability Analysis

This feature will assist you when performing content audits. It computes readability scores, average readability level, number of words, sentences and characters of a site pages.

Readability Analysis in Visual SEO Studio (click to enlarge)

You can optionally (recommended) use an XPath expression and restrict the analysis to the content part of the web page, ignoring the boilerplate (navigational menus, header, footer, side panels...).

Readability formulas used for English texts:

• Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES)
• Flesch-Kincaid grade level
• Gunning's Fog Index
• SMOG index
• Automated Readability Index (ARI)
• Coleman-Liau Index
• and the average of the five aforementioned grading school levels.

Readability formulas used for Italian texts:

• Flesch-Vacca score (1972 formula)
• Flesch-Vacca score (1986 formula)
• Gulpease index

Readability formulas used for French texts:

• Kandel-Moles's score
• Szigriszt's "Lisibilité"

Readability formulas used for Spanish texts:

• Fernández Huerta's "Lecturabilidad"
• Szigriszt's "Perspicuidad"

At present readability scores are available for texts in English, Italian, French and Spanish.
You can use the tool for other languages as well to audit word/sentence/letter counts of page sections located by XPath expressions:

"Other languages" option in Readability Analysis

We recommend always setting the correct language if available, even if you are only interested in the counters and not in readability scores: correct sentence computation takes into account the most common abbreviations for the selected language. For example, the text "Mr. Brown and Dr. Fox" is a single sentence in English.

Cherry on the cake, we added a language detection module to test whether the text is really in the language for which you selected the used readability formulas.

Detected language column in Readability Analysis

When the detected language is different, it will be evidenced in red and the related score should not be considered. Even if you normally set exclusion paths to restrict to only a language, we have found that it often happens to find content in an unexpected language in multilingual web sites.

Note:
"Readability Analysis" is available only in the Professional Edition. You can evaluate it for free for 15 days by registering the Trial version.

See also:

• Help page Manual: Readability Analysis.
• Blog article: Visual SEO Studio 1.3 adds Readability, where the Readability Analysis feature was first introduced.
  The article gives further details and provides examples of usage.
• Blog article: Readability and Search Engines. Facts, evidences and opinions on how search engines consider the ease of reading.