Mew 👑 Content length no longer matters…let me say it again. Google is not counting your words So the question is, how many words should my page be to rank? The answer: as long as it needs to be to answer the search intent. But what's this really mean and how do you know what the "intent" is. Here's how 1.) Go to the search engine results pages SERP and look at Page 1, and make a spreadsheet. 2.) Begin comparing and contrasting what these pages have in common and what they do not (including approximate word counts from a combined average). 3.) Identify if the query is transactional, informational, or directional. 4.) Hypothesize what none of the properties did. 5.) Answer the query within the first sentence of your document, based on the intent. 6.) Create another spreadsheet with an On-Page SEO (Search Engine Optimization) template and checklist. 7.) Identify what was done correctly On-Page from each property and the gaps. 8.) Identify how your document will be better. Did the competing properties name their pictures right? Did they use semantic heading principles? Did they include a FAQ section? Is their schema done properly? Should they have a comment section and don't? Should they have an author bio and don't? Should they have used citational resources and don't? So forth and so on. 9.) Create your page and submit it to Google Search Console (GSC). 10.) If it's cornerstone content, add, reduce, change or update things on your page weekly. 11.) As soon as it hits the SERP analyze the surrounding properties if it does not move for 1-2 weeks. Repeat steps above. 12.) Have another SEO look at it for recommendations. 13.) Get backlinks from in niche sites for similar relevancy words. 14.) BE PATIENT [filtered from 46 💬🗨]
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Martin Awesome gold nuggets! Thanks for sharing I base my content length on what my competitors have published and add a couple hundred more. Sure, my goal is to answer the questions people are asking Cherrie I have been contemplating about this one, too. Every time I search something on Google, the results are blog posts with 500 words only, even less. I make it a habit to write at least 1k words. Now, I guess I need to adjust. Kevin Why, then, do often quoted research shows user engagement (shares, likes, sales) increasing as the length of the post increasing (I think the cut off point needs to be identified)? Granted we cannot generalize and all depends on the industry and niche.
Mew 👑✍️ » Kevin – Depends on whether it’s a transactional, informational or directional search 🙂 Kevin » Mew What do you mean by "directional" search? (I don't mean to come across as slagging your post – I am very curious to learn and try and understand your perspective). Mew 👑✍️ » Kevin – Google classifies all searches into three categories. Informational (information about something) Transactional (a purchase intent) Directional (Trying to physically get directions on how to do something or get somewhere geographically). 👍🏽2
Nick I think content length is important in the sense that longer content often times drives longer user experience (UX) metrics (time on-site, more opportunities to insert a link & get another page view, etc than shorter content. 👍🏽2
Mew 👑✍️ » Nick – I think this depends on the vertical and what Google has established as the average or optimal dwell time – don’t you? Nick » Mew 1000%, I think it's a stacked rank metric for what they could show for a given keyword, so it will vary every time 👍🏽1
Malhi Yeah it depends from niche to niche…as well as search term too Sometimes for a specific term in a particular niche a 500wprs article could make the cut and successfully convey the answer required to a user whereas it might require a 2k word article to make a cut and satisfy user intent..it's all about satisfying user intent… There's another reason also… A 500 word article won't get ranked for 50 keyword combinations whereas a semantically optimized content may get ranked for 100 semantically related keyword combinations and bring in more traffic …so longer the better in that sense. 👍🏽💟5 Andrew True and false and you don’t really need to make a speed sheet to crawl all the 1# link because there are plenty of extension will do that to you all under one click, and also , it is not the word count matter, it’s whether the content that you provided are helpful to the audience but in most case the content with more length usually rank better, mostly because of the complexity and structure of the content, you can’t expect yourself to rank up just by putting 200-word articles. 👍🏽1 Randine Agreed Andrew. I was just reading the latest update guidelines and the name of the game is to provide content that is valuable and says something different. You cannot provide high quality content that digs deep in less than 1000 words. Surface exploration just doesn't make the grade.
Andrew It kind if make sense right? If you are writing about something then you will need the structure, the good structure content usually involves lots of head topics and each subject can be developed complex further so it is kind of hard to reach all of this with minimum content quantity, but, that does not mean it's related to the word count! If you are looking for content such as medical content such as procedure pages, each content is quite complex and provides lots amount of information to audiences.
