If you’re like many people, you probably believe in the unimpeachable word count. The notion is that the longer you make a piece, the better it will perform on the search engine results page. The idea is that there’s some sort of magic ‘sweet spot’ for content length that will land you on the first page of Google.
It’s somewhat unclear how these became such common beliefs in the search engine optimization space. Because the truth is that content length has no direct bearing on PageRank. It never has.
This isn’t just us saying this, either. As noted by Search Engine Journal, Google has stated as much on more than one occasion. More specifically, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller, who’s posed the question on a regular basis.
“Word count is not a ranking factor,” wrote Mueller on Reddit. “Save yourself the trouble.”
“Word count is not indicative of quality,” Mueller explained, this time on Twitter. “Some pages have a lot of words that say nothing. Some pages have very few words that are very important & relevant to queries. You know your content best (hopefully) and can decide whether it needs the details.”
Search Engine Journal noted in another piece that Mueller has also stated that word count is a quality factor rather than a ranking factor. Adding more text without good reason will do nothing to improve your content. In short, there is no arbitrary ‘perfect’ word count.
Content should be exactly as long as it needs to be in order to convey its message. A piece with 1000 words is no more likely to be relevant than a piece with 100 lacks relevance—in actuality, longer content could potentially perform even worse than short form, depending on device and audience.
Therefore, the best advice we can give you is to stop stressing about length. Just focus on creating high-quality, compelling content, and everything else will fall into place. And remember that there are many elements that are significantly more important than meeting some milestone that doesn’t actually exist:
- Page speed
- Performance
- Ease of use
- Bounce rate
- Domain age, history, authority, and registration length
- Keywords—primarily whether or not they appear in your title tag, header tag, and copy
- Backlinks
- Optimization
If you’re looking for affordable web hosting that is built around SEO development, check out our services! In an era of microblogging and mobile Internet, length is functionally irrelevant. What matters isn’t how much space something takes up on a page. What matters is that it fulfills your audience’s search queries. What matters is that it provides people with genuine value.
Beyond that, everything else is ultimately secondary.
