Amsive

PUBLISHED: Mar 3, 2014 2 min read

Can Everyone Understand What You’re Talking About?

If you own a business or are responsible for marketing someone else’s company, chances are you have created content before. Blogs are a great way to continually add to your website and reach a broader audience. But what if your content is not easily digestible by a large audience?

The trick is to water down your content so that a five year old can understand it. Maybe not that much, but the idea is to write so that anyone can understand what you’re talking about. The content you are creating may be easy for you to understand because you’re in that field, but what about potential clients? Can they understand it?

A recent video (below) posted by GoogleWebmasterHelp on YouTube has Matt Cutts talking about this topic. In his video Matt says “the best way to understand something is to teach, and if you can’t teach it and you can’t explain it well you don’t really understand it.”

That’s really the best approach to writing; pretend you’re teaching it to someone who has never heard of it before. If you can clearly explain what it is that you do, you will notice that your readership will increase.

There is a great plugin for WordPress called WordPress SEO that helps  you not only see if your target keywords are being met, but it also uses something called the Flesch-Kincaid readability test.  Loosely put, this formula is able to predict the reading level of your content. This is a powerful tool that can help you change your content so it’s understood by a larger audience.

I personally like to review things three times.

Here is the approach I take: After writing content, re-read what you wrote and check for any spelling and grammatical errors. Next, glance over again and see if you can reword something that may explain it better. Finally, ask someone in another department, or even another field to review what you wrote and see if they are able to understand it.

With so much content being published on a daily basis, delivering your message clearly and being understood is extremely important.

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