Does Google Favour a Certain Word Count for SEO in Content?
How important is word count for SEO? Does Google care about word count? Let’s get into the nitty gritty of a target word count for SEO best practices.
Size matters — but not necessarily for SEO word count
Bigger is better when it comes to things like ice cream cones, but when it comes to word count, that’s not necessarily the case. Longer content, in and of itself, does not improve search engine results.
In fact, if your 5,000 word content is not helpful and not unique, Google is unlikely to surface this content in their search engine.
And if you write to whatever today’s ideal word count is supposed to be, you’ll be switching from 500 to 3,000 words all the time. As Google’s algorithm constantly changes, so too does the best practices advice from SEO experts. Over the past decade, word count recommendations have ranged from 500ish words for blog posts to 1,500+ for sourced and researched articles, with some current research showing 2,000 words as the new sweet spot.
There are some correlations that indicate some longer content performs better than some shorter content – but longer content is not a guarantee of performing better. This means that there is no ideal length for SEO and that a higher word count doesn’t automatically translate to a higher ranking on Google.
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Content Length - Is Long-Form Content Best for SEO?
As with everything in life, moderation is the best bet.
While extremely short blog posts and other short-form content can be highly successful, they’re not the norm. Seth Godin’s articles average less than 200 words (a very low word count), but he is a recognized marketing expert and influencer. Unlike most of us, his social media shares for those pithy pieces are in the hundreds of thousands.
It usually takes us mere mortals a bit longer to provide what Godin does in a handful of words: high quality, actionable information.
And even though Google does take note of the time readers spend on a webpage (which wouldn’t be long in Godin’s case), it also considers social shares and backlinks. Those incoming links are important in SEO terms because they give credibility to your website, especially if your site is linked to from an authority page (an influencer, or a .gov, .edu, etc.).
SEO Tips for High-Quality Content
Instead of concentrating on word count, write quality content and implement standard web writing strategies faithfully. When you’re writing for the web, you can’t forget the basics if you want to create search engine optimized content. Implement these tips into your SEO strategy:
- Be smart with keywords. Research and then integrate long-tail and short-tail keywords into your piece of content. Make it natural and don’t worry about keyword density.
- Craft those headlines, and format with sub-heads. Use keywords in both.
- Break text with white space, bullet points, images including graphs. Even if your word count isn’t high, engaging content will keep readers on your page longer, which is taken into consideration by search engines.
- Publish regularly. Unless you’re just starting out, regularly does not have to be often — monthly is fine.
- Share content on social media, but also ask influencers to share with their followers.
- Use a tool such as NeuronWriter to tell you how long your competitors’ content is.
Rather than focusing on a minimum word count, focus on:
1. Helpfulness. Does your content actually provide value to the reader? Let this be your focus when creating content, instead of getting to a certain number of words. Helpful, on topic, writing will result in better engagement.
2. E-E-A-T. Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. E-E-A-T is integral to Google’s guidelines for assessing the quality of web content.
While optimal word count shouldn’t be your focus in the content itself, do carefully count the length of your page titles and meta descriptions!
What is a good title length for SEO? Page titles should be between 51-60 characters in length, and pay attention to page title best practices while you’re at it.
How long should a meta description be? Meta descriptions should be an ideal maximum of 150 characters, but if you nail a meta description don’t worry if it’s above or below that by a few characters. There are lots of elements to keep in mind when crafting the perfect meta description, so you can’t put all your thought into length.
Provide Value, Not Words - It's Quality over Quantity for SEO Content
Not convinced that you don’t need to hit a certain word count to rank better? Let’s take a look at how my content performs compared to competitors.
I have a blog post up about Google Ad Grants for Non-Profit Organizations. It is currently sitting at 892 words and when you search the term “google ads grants” it ranks 5th, below pages from Google itself (keep in mind that depending on who you are and where you are located, search results might be different).
The next blog post below us is at 2,413 words and covers mainly the exact same content, but just with a lot more detail and step by step instructions. If it were true that longer content performs better, they should be sitting above DriveTraffic on the search engine results page.
One reason this could happen is greater domain authority (e.g. if your content is weak but your domain authority is strong, you might rank better that someone with strong content but poor domain authority). While I don’t believe my content is weak, with Google it is always somewhat of a guessing game – you’ll never know for sure why your pages are or aren’t performing well. For this reason, continue to focus on the quality of your content, the readability of your content, following best practices, and continually improving your domain authority.
Avoiding Thin Content - Sabotaging Your SEO Performance
What’s thin content when it comes to SEO?
Thin content refers to a site that contains pages of content that do not bring value to the reader. Google can catch when a page provides little useful information and will penalize these pages. Yet another reason to focus on the quality of your content rather than fluffing it up with words and hitting a high word count!
Wondering if your content is valuable to your reader? We have a blog post exploring thin content (and how to avoid it) in more detail.
Tips to Continue Improving Your Blog or Pages
Keep an eye on your competitors! Check their backlinks: if they’ve got high quality inbound links and are being shared extensively, then do what they’re doing — only better. That may mean switching to longer articles; which is a change you can easily test to see if it’s making a difference.
You need to be honest here. If your switch to long form content is not making a difference, it may be that the problem runs deeper than word count. Maybe you’re simply not providing the best answer to commonly asked questions, or the quality of the content isn’t great. There’s so much more that goes into SEO rankings than just a specific word count.
When your mission is to help your customers, you’ll recognize what should be a secondary goal: becoming an accepted resource, the go-to expert in your field.
Need help with your content creation to ensure it is SEO-friendly? We can help boost your content’s effectiveness with conversion while remaining within SEO guidelines. Contact DriveTraffic today!
- About the Author
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Darlene is a search marketer, analyst, speaker, trainer, and owner of DriveTraffic Digital Marketing. She has been working in the digital marketing industry since the mid 90s and has narrowed her specialty to SEO, Google Ads and Google Analytics. She is especially interested in Google’s new Search Generative Experience and how businesses will need to adapt to remain visible. Want to see how DriveTraffic can help? Let’s chat!
