What Is the Best Word Count for SEO?
This has to be one of the trickiest questions for the content creators. How many words are perfect for my blog to rank on top? You will find all sorts of sizes for contents 400,800 1500, 2500, and more. Before we deep dive and find out what is the best word count from an SEO standpoint. Let’s note one thing content quality is not based on the number of words, It purely depends on the search intent. If your content is providing the answer users are looking for, fulfilling their search intent. Rest assured you have great content and it’s bound to get clicks. So do not stretch your content more than what It should be, If you can answer something in 400 words, crisply and precisely. Stick to 400 words; there is no need to write 1000 words on it and stuff keywords thinking that will give top ranking or clicks. If anything, it makes the content redundant and doesn’t give the user a good reading experience. User experience forms the core of search engines. If you lack there forget about ranking and SEOs. For more information, you can contact an SEO company.
Think from Google’s perspective:
Google wants to have its users a great experience. Longer content works well since they are comprehensive and can answer questions for multiple users. Let’s say you write a blog post on Higher Education; you cannot just have a neatly written 300 words paragraph for it. Instead, you would like to include every aspect related to higher studies. Like, is the current structure good enough? What are the shortcomings? How does a student loan work? Role of Government in reducing the burden on students? Does higher education provide good prospects in terms of jobs and entrepreneurship? Can we link higher education across the world? There can be ten other things that come to mind. Having great content on this topic would mean super long content. Instead of 2 minutes read it might be a 30 mins read. This will be perfect for a search engine, user, and content creator.
Long Posts are good for SEO:
Research has shown that the longer form stands good chances to be in SERPs. Average word count comes up above 2000 in most of the studies done so far. Although Google doesn’t look at the word count for ranking however a comprehensive article tends to help other factors which are considered a must for Google rankings.
- Backlinks – A longer content will more likely to have more backlinks which are a key factor for good SEO. If you are providing an in-depth article where users all the queries are getting answered, this makes your content much more valuable, and reputed content creators in your field will like to get associated with you.
- More Social Shares – Long-form content generally gets shared much more than shorter content. As per studies, long-form content is shared 20% more than short content. The reason is the same again. Readers see value in the content and once they get the answer it’s human tendency to share with their peer group who they think will like it.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR) – Having longer content also helps you generate better CTR, which means you will have actual conversions and not just impressions. The Click-through rate is another key factor in SEO. This tells the user that users are actually clicking the content and staying on your page for a longer period. Higher word counts help you navigate readers better and they can choose to move to different subheadings to explore more.
- Lesser Bounce Back – If you have an in-depth post. Users will find all the answers and instead of jumping from websites to websites will stick to your site. This means lesser bounce back and just like CTR is an important measure for search engines to understand the true value of the content.
Conclusion – Have we cracked the code? Can you go ahead and start writing long posts of 3000 words and get great SEO results? Not really. As we discussed. Your content has to be really good and provide value to users, in order to be SEO friendly. Longer word count can certainly prove beneficial however it doesn’t mean just having the higher word count is enough. You really need to spend time in developing high-quality content. Do a thorough analysis by looking at SERPs for the topic you are working on. Look at what all questions are getting answered. Make sure your content contains not only what is already available but something more which is missing in existing top-ranking pages. What makes life easy for you is the fact that both search engines and users are looking at the same parameters like catchy titles and descriptions, utility, value, comprehensiveness. Make sure these two stakeholders are happy and you will reap the benefits.
