Content Improvement Club is our regular meetup for web publishers. This month, we looked at choosing the right words for our content so that it’s easy to find, use and understand.

Our revamped content improvement meetups

We recently launched Content Improvement Club, a series of meetups aimed at staff who work with web publishing at the University. The meetup builds on similar sessions that we ran in 2024, and is based on two ideas:

• Learning more about creating effective content​
• Working on your existing content with other publishers​

In this post, I’ll cover some of what we discussed in this month’s session.

Find the words that resonate with your users

Our topic this month was about finding the words that our users will understand.

Guides on how to write for the web often recommend using the words that our audiences use. For example, see PlainLanguage.gov, a writing guide for people working in the US government:

When you’re making word choices, pick the familiar or commonly used word over the unusual or obscure.

Use simple words and phrases | PlainLanguage.gov

There are four main reasons to use the words that your audiences use.

First, it makes your content easier to find. Google have this as the second bullet point on their list of best practices for search engine optimisation:

Use words that people would use to look for your content, and place those words in prominent locations on the page, such as the title and main heading of a page, and other descriptive locations such as alt text and link text.

Google Search Essentials

Second, it makes your content easier to use. When watching people interact with sites in usability tests, we frequently see people scrolling quickly though a page looking for a close match to the keyword they have in mind. When the page has that keyword – especially if it appears in a heading – users can find the information they’re looking for more quickly.

Third, it makes your content easier to understand. Jargon and excessively formal language can make it harder for users to know what a page is saying. Sometimes technical terms and internal jargon are necessary and appropriate for our audience. But when they’re not, our readers will find it easier when we replace them with simpler alternatives.

Finally, it helps to create the right tone of voice. In a lot of our writing for University websites, we’re aiming for a conversational but factual tone that gets information across clearly. That typically means using more everyday language where we can.

Tone of voice | University of Edinburgh Brand SharePoint (University login required)

Some jargon is unavoidable

Before people apply to study at Edinburgh, there’s a fair chance they won’t have encountered terms like MyEd, Euclid, matriculation or exam diets. We can explain what those terms mean, but we can’t avoid all mention of them.

In the session, we discussed some examples of the jargon that crops up on our websites.

Some of this was suitable for its audience – for instance, specific scientific terminology on a website about clinical sciences.

In other cases, the jargon consisted of acronyms and abbreviations that benefit from being spelled out when they’re included on a website.

How to check the readability of your writing

So how do you check that your content is easy to read?

Usability testing

The best method we’ve tried is usability testing: putting your content in front of someone who approximates a user and seeing if they can use it to complete a specified task. With this method, you can see where people encounter obstacles when using a site, and sometimes this will be because of a particular word choice on a page.

In a usability test, you can ask the participant to tell you more about which specific words they’re looking for and you can observe which words might cause them to get stuck.

Highlighter testing

Another method we’ve used is putting your content in front of someone who’s not familiar with it and asking them to mark anything they find confusing or unclear. This is sometimes called highlighter testing:

Highlighter testing for content | Welsh Government Centre for Digital Public Services

The plus-minus technique is a similar idea:

“Participants are asked to read a document and put pluses and minuses in the margin for positive and negative reading experiences. After that, the reasons for the pluses and minuses are explored in an individual interview.”—Menno De Jong and Peter Jan Schellens. “Toward a Document Evaluation Methodology: What Does Research Tell Us about the Validity and Reliability of Evaluation Methods?” IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, October 2000.

You can read more about the plus-minus technique here:

Readability Formulas: 7 Reasons to Avoid Them and What to Do Instead

Keyword research

Keyword research tools seem like they might be useful but we’ve had mixed results. Tools like UberSuggest and Ahrefs claim to show popular keywords related to a given product or service. But their methods are opaque, and it’s difficult to confidently assess the reliability of the data.

Tools like Google Trends can help to track which of various synonyms people commonly search for.

Google Trends graph comparing UK search volume for “doctor”, “gp”, “medic” and “physician”

Again, opaque methods and lots of room for misinterpreting the data. But it can be an interesting tool to explore if you’re choosing between a range of possible terms.

Some participants in the session mentioned using tools that allow you to track popular hashtags in social media platforms. These can also provide helpful clues about how an audience refers to a service that we provide.

Session activities

After a discussion of the topic, attendees worked on printouts of webpages from their sites. The activity functioned as a light touch peer review: attendees marked any areas of the page that might be hard to understand and made suggestions for improvement.

At the end of the session, we shared our comments and feedback. Attendees took away a marked-up printout of the page they had suggested, with some ideas from colleagues for how they could make the content better.

How to hear about our next session

We’ll promote our next session via our mailing list. So if you think you’d be interested, please sign up:

Join the UX and Content Design mailing list (University login required)

Other training that we offer

More training is listed on the User Experience Service website:

Training | User Experience Service