How many words per page?
-
I know this has been answered before, but I don't think it has been in about a year (and we all know how quickly the SEO landscape can change). We're having a little debate on it right now and I'd be curious to get some feedback from the community.
What is the minimum number of words you would use on a page? Does it matter to you if it's a second tier (website.com/x) or third tier (website.com/x/y) page?
It's always a tough sell on design between trying to keep it clean and trying to provide a lot of useful information. I'd be curious what your thoughts are. Thanks!
-Adam
-
[Spammy comment removed by forum moderator.]
-
Well if you think the brand exposure TSC has that catapults them to top rankings. If you a small retailer selling Horse Stall Mats with zero brand it will be an uphill battle. However I have found the amount of on page content plays a minimal role to the overall ranking factor. The biggest factors would be to have great branded links that pertain to your business, Social Media Presence with high engagement, and useful evergreen content on your site for people.
It looks like you have decent rankings for that keyterm. With out going to involved it looks like a little push from links to that page and work on your social media engagement since that's really lacking.
-
I'm confused by this because the author says a good percentage of the pages on Page 1 consist of 1000 words or more. However, I find a large number of pages on Page 1 consisting of very little text. For example, if you were to search for "horse stall mats", the number one listing is Tractor Supply. Go to the page and there's very little by way of keywording in the content itself. The meta is kw'd but there's very little related content (text).
-
Don't think of the word count as metric. Think about your users (I know that's becoming cliche now). Does a 200 word post help them with something or at least useful. I don't know of many that are. Sometimes that sort of short winded post may be better off on Google+, FB or Twitter.
Neil Patel wrote a really good article a year ago this time about the more words the merrier. Over 2,000 words in a post seemed to rank it. http://www.quicksprout.com/2012/12/20/the-science-behind-long-copy-how-more-content-increases-rankings-and-conversions/
Also John Doherty wrote on the MozBlog about the types of posts that get links and he did some analysis to back it up.
-
Thanks! I also agree with what Neil Patel said in that post that sometimes, long copy can interfere with conversions. It's a big "it depends". Sometimes all you need is a brief answer to an FAQ that will take you 100 words, and other times you need 2000 words to properly cover a subject.
-
I have found pages with 1000 plus words and various pics references and a video or animation rank very well. I'm sure if you hit 5000 words it may get a bit out of hand but in my experience more is better within reason. It's the video or animation that I find really makes the difference. I still count 300-400 as a bare minimum.
-
Certainly! Here is a great read on content length. But again Quality will be the biggest factor.
-
Hi! Would you care to share more information about the source of that number? It's always helpful to know background for this type of information.
-
Still around 700+ There is really not a formula as pages with 300 words rank very well.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Web page or blog ? Which one is preferable
Hello, For one of our sites, 19 keywords are ranking on Home page. But, the home page doesn't have content with those keywords. I am afraid that with Google updates, we will eventually lose all the ranking position for these keywords. Should we ask the client to create blog around those keywords or create separate pages ? Thanks
Content Development | | Johnroger0 -
How do I split page content?
So I offer two services for which each has an FAQ page (let's call them S1 and S2). The problem is that I also have a longer FAQ page that covers both services (S1-2). I would like to eliminate the longer one and attach the relevant content to each of the shorter pages but i'm concerned that deleting pages with a lot of content might be a bad idea. I could redirect I suppose but I wouldn't know which page S1 or S2 to point redirect to. Any advice on this?
Content Development | | NationalPardon0 -
Pages and categories with the same name?
I manage a wordpress based site that is needing to under go a site architecture overhaul. the site is christ.org and one of the problems is it has 89 pages but really only 4 are navigatable (not a word apparently). The site also has over 400 posts so categories and parent pages are both definitely needed. One option is I convert a lot of the pages into posts, but would that happen to break any links pointing to those pages turned posts? Or another option is to keep the pages and posts and create a bunch of subpages, then I would most likely end up with similarly named categories and top level pages. I would guess the name of the category needs to be unique from page titles right? And not just unique but very much differentiated than any page title (not posts but page titles). Maybe what I need to do is convert the pages that are not really unique into posts and put them in the category it fits with. And then keep those that are unique as top level pages. The architecture needs some serious work I think 🙂 Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Content Development | | ThridHour0 -
Does every keyword need its own landing page?
So we're doing a bunch of keyword research. We've identified the big traffic, higher competition keywords and we've identified tons (thousands) of long-tail keywords that would be appropriate. What I'm wondering is: does every keyword need its own landing page (or content page)? Obviously, we'll be building content for all the primary keywords we're targeting. I'm less mystified about that. What I'm more confused about is what to do about the long tail keywords. For there to be any measurable traffic increase, we need to rank well for thousands of long tail keywords. But it's just not realistic to create thousands of quality content pieces to target each of these long tail keywords individually. So how do you go about ranking for large numbers of long tail keywords? I saw somebody post about using an FAQ page to target multiple long tail keywords which makes sense but even with that I'm not going to have a thousand questions. How does one go after large volumes of long tail keywords? Thanks, --eric
Content Development | | EricOliver0 -
Correction Duplicate Page Title Problems for a Blog
EDITED: To just focus on the issue at hand. I am trying to figure out the SEO rules instead of just working on the content. Please bear with me. I am adept technically. I just do not know the rules of the SEO process or even some of the termology. So I’m trying to attack problems one at time. Today’s problem – **Duplicate Page Titles ** We evidently have thousands of Duplicate Page Titles. We are using Joomla 2.5 & Easyblog. Our sitemap is automated from XML Sitemap Easyblog takes the title of the sites and uses it for a name of the summary pages. We post 5 blog items per page and all the names are the same. http://www.OursiteName.com/?start=5 Page Title = Site Name http://www.OursiteName.com/?start=10 Page Title = Site Name A similar thing happens on the sorting by Author or Category etc etc. Basically non-duplicate pages are looking like duplicates. What is the best practice / approach? Using the Robot.txt or XML Sitemap to tell Google not to crawl these pages? Writing a script or edit the Easyblog code to edit the 2000 duplicate Page Titles? Other thoughts?
Content Development | | Romana0 -
Is my new page to busy please advise
hi i am testing a page which i am working on at the moment, have some image problems which i am sorting out. what i would like to know if you feel this page is to busy or if this page looks ok. I would also like to know if this page would tempt you to click on other articles or if you would just go off this page once you have read the story. here is the page http://www.in2town.co.uk/news/celebrity-showbiz-news/fans-angry-over-x-factor-judge-nicole-scherzinger any help would be great
Content Development | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Simple question: How many words optimal for blog posts
Hello, We're adding a blog to one of our sites. How many words should be in a blog post for it to be optimal for the search engines? If it varies from industry to industry, please give a couple of examples. We were going to do 500 words but that seems a bit long. Thanks!
Content Development | | BobGW0 -
Help with Duplicate Content Issue for pages...
I have pages with duplicate content, i want to put them on hold while i write unique content as i do not want to get marked down for it. I also want to keep the urls and use them again.
Content Development | | pauledwards
There are about 300 pages affected by duplicate content currently. Am i best doing 302 redirects as it is temporary? to the origional source of the content, or canonical tags no index? The pages are currently indexed and cahced by google, i want to use the url in the future for unique content to get it valued by Google. Any advice much appreciated. Kind Regards,0