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
-
Should I Be Concerned about Too Many Links in Interview?
I was contacted recently from a small online magazine (DA 17) who wanted to interview me about my area of expertise. Although it's not a high authority site, I gladly accepted, conducted the interview, and he posted it on his site today. Throughout the course of the final interview article, he linked to my website 5 times. Once in the intro, and 4 times in reference to different answers I gave. At this point, I'm wondering if it looks like a spammy guest post, even though it was legitimately conducted. Should I ask him to remove some of the links so it doesn't look spammy? I feel kinda bad because he's not trying to do anything fishy. If you want to see the referenced article, you can check it out here: http://mensmagdaily.com/counting-cards-colin-of-blackjackapprentice-com-shows-us-the-ropes/
Content Development | | cojo0 -
Authorship on Pages
Hi there - I have just been told that it is a big "no no" to add authorship to a standard page and that it should only be used on blog posts. Is this true? What are the negative effects of using authorship on a page? I added the rel="author" tag to a page that talks about a member of our team and a few weeks ago his picture started showing next to the search results entry on Google - great for click through rate, however is this improper usage? Any help welcome!
Content Development | | DHS_SH0 -
Duplicate page title on blog
Is this something I should b concerned about? I get about 6 posts per page with unique titles - however the title per page is not unique. Is this important?
Content Development | | MartinSpence460 -
Is it advisable to have unique pages for different cities/states though there wouldnt be any actual differentiation in the actual content.
Is it advisable to have unique pages for different cities/states though there wouldnt be any actual differentiation in the content. For example should we have separate pages for "hammers in california" & "hammers in new york". The product is same and content more or less the same. The search volume for individual queries is low but collectively makes a large number. The unique title tag automatically will generate traffic. So does it make sense to make 50 such pages. Else is there any way to uniquely target 50 such queries/month/city
Content Development | | DYo0 -
What is the best practice for using the same content on two pages?
I have two websites in a very similar niche(s)...I have good unique content article that I would like to use on both sites because it adds value to the visitor experience.. Example: Science of Colors would be very useful for my seattle house painting paint colors page. I want to have content so they do not need to leave the site to navigate to second site. Would the identical content trigger a penalty or would it be crawled, ignored, and not indexed. Does having a rel=authorship on one site trump the site..Or is it a pile of BAD.
Content Development | | johnshearer0 -
Page hidden in SERPs
As well as unique content, we carry press releases (contracts with PR companies) Some pages don't show up in SERPs - but sometimes a few or even hundreds of other sites do. At the end of the search, google shows this: In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 109 already displayed.
Content Development | | loopyal
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included. When the search is repeated, using that link, the page often shows up in the top 10 or top 20. I believe this is a site problem, not a page problem. We are often one of the first to publish the release.0 -
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 -
Should I Have No Index, No Follow On Blog Category & Tag Pages?
At some point in the past I read or was told that No Index, No Follow tags on category and tag pages were a good thing on a standard WordPress blog in order to prevent duplicate content issues. Is this still true or was it ever true?
Content Development | | eTundra0