Readability & Word Counter: Common Mistakes and Best Practices

Most problems with readability & Word Counter aren't caused by not knowing what to do — they're caused by small, easy-to-miss mistakes that compound quietly over time. Here are the ones that come up most often.

Mistake 1: Chasing a specific readability score as the goal itself, producing choppy, overly simplistic writing that undersells genuinely technical topics.

Mistake 2: Writing in dense, unbroken paragraphs regardless of what the readability tool reports, since screen-reading behavior punishes wall-of-text formatting regardless of sentence complexity.

Mistake 3: Ignoring word count entirely — pages that are far shorter than what genuinely covers the topic tend to underperform regardless of how 'readable' each sentence is.

The fix for most of these isn't more effort, it's a regular check. A few habits that prevent them from creeping back in:
- Use shorter sentences for the direct-answer parts of a page (especially anything targeting a featured snippet) and allow more complexity in supporting detail.
- Read content aloud as a final check — awkward phrasing that scores fine on an automated readability formula is often immediately obvious out loud.

Worth reading alongside this: our guide to featured snippet optimization, which covers the adjacent side of the same part of a technical SEO audit.

Readability & Word Counter catches most of this automatically, which is the easiest way to stop these mistakes from shipping in the first place.

Everything in this guide runs directly in your browser — no signup, no install.