How Does Word Count Affect SEO?

How Does Word Count Affect SEO?

You perform keyword analysis & on-page analysis, monitor backlink, generate SEO reports and write quality content. Still, your posts do not get the best ranking in the search engine. What could be the factor you are missing out on?

Google has started to rank detailed, comprehensive, relevant, and informative content higher in the search engines. Over the past few years, Google’s priority is content quality. Posts with fewer words do not look relevant or informative to your audience. The readers rather prefer a long and detailed post that explains every aspect of the topic clearly. That’s the reason why webmasters have started pondering what the best word count for blog posts could be. 

What the post must be about, the audience it targets, and the information it contains are all the secondary factors. The attention is always around the word count of the posts rather than the information it offers and the audience it targets.

Longer Posts Rank Better – The Biggest SEO Myth

Ask any SEO specialist and you will be told that longer posts rank better in the search engines. The idea is simple: the more words you add to your blog, the more authoritative and informative it appears to Google, and the higher the chances it will secure a high rank. 

According to studies, most pages that rank on the first page of the Google search results contain around 1,447 words. Now, it is easy for people to believe that they need to create 1500 words long posts to rank higher. Note that this isn’t what the research suggests. It rather tries to find the common features in the high-ranking posts. 

Read also: Tips to Perform SEO Audit

So, What is the Ideal Word Count on a Page?

First things first – the content you write is for human readers not search bots. Google has been constantly penalizing websites that stuff their posts with keywords just to rank their website higher in the search engine. 

Google no longer supports these tricks. So, the number of word counts on a particular page must be as much as your readers need to know. This could be a short and precise answer to a specific question, a detailed guide or tutorial, and a normal-length post that explains the specifications and perks of a product. 

In other words, you are supposed to prioritize your audience’s requirements and create each post according to their goals. 

Of course, you would like to get a rough estimate of the ideal word count for each post. However, there is no specific word count. If you want to get a higher ranking, you will need to keep posting content that meets your audience’s requirement and Google’s ranking algorithm. The search engine will return with the content that matches and answers the user’s query. 

The word count is hardly the factor to decide your posts’ ranking. So, the number of words you add to your title, body of the content, each subhead, paragraphs, and conclusion will not matter to the search engine. What matters is how well your post addresses your reader’s query. The quality of your blog is the first thing the search bots notice. Quality cannot be determined by the length of a page. Some pages contain only a few words and still manage to secure the first position in the search engine. Make sure that volume doesn’t play an integral role in ranking your website content. It is the way you present this information and answers your audience’s queries.

Bottom Line

You need to perform an SEO audit, improve content quality, and address customer issues to rank higher rather than focussing on the content volume.