Understanding Passive and Active Voice in Website Content
You may have come across the terms passive voice and active voice when working on your website, especially if you’re using tools to help optimise your pages. Tools like these often flag passive voice and recommend switching to active voice — but what does that actually mean?
The Difference Between Passive and Active Voice
Let’s keep it simple:
- Active voice is when the subject of the sentence does the action.✅ The company wrote the report.
- Passive voice is when the subject receives the action.🚫 The report was written by the company.
That’s the basic difference. It may seem minor, but it can have a big impact on how your content reads.
Why We Change Passive Voice to Active Voice
When we optimise web pages, we often rewrite sentences in the active voice. This small change gives your content more energy and clarity. It puts the focus on the action and makes the message more direct and engaging — which is exactly what you want in marketing.
Passive voice tends to sound vague or less confident. Active voice, on the other hand, helps your content sound clear, professional, and purposeful.
A Quick Breakdown:
- Active voice = Subject → Verb → Object(The business launched a new product.)
- Passive voice = Object → Verb → (by Subject)(A new product was launched by the business.)
Why It Matters for SEO
You might think it’s a small detail, but switching to active voice helps improve your on-page SEO. Tools like Yoast often give your page a green light for readability when you reduce passive voice. And that means search engines are more likely to favour your content too.
Final Thought
While not every passive sentence needs rewriting, being aware of the difference and using active voice wherever possible will make your website content stronger, clearer, and more effective — both for your readers and for search engines.
What we do
When we optimise websites, checking and editing passive voice is usually one of the last steps we take. First, we update ALT tags, add plenty of rich content, and ensure sentences are well-spaced. We include target keywords within the content and tag all images appropriately. After completing all these essentials, the final touch that often pushes your page to a 100% green light score is editing your sentences to use active voice. If you want perfection, it’s worth the effort. However, if you’re short on time and your page is scoring around 70 or 80%, it’s okay to move on and focus on the fundamentals first. I wrote this article to help those wondering how important this step is — it’s valuable if you want to excel, but don’t let it hold you back from completing the basics.
