There are so many ranking factors that affect search engine optimization. Digital marketers are always concerned about how to perfectly plan their SEO marketing to give them maximum benefit and boost their website or blog ranking. They are always concerned about what is best for SEO, what should be their SEO strategysocial media, and what steps to focus on in website optimization.
One of the trending topics that have emerged nowadays is what should be the ideal SEO word count for the content. There are too many questions revolving around how many words are best for SEO content strategy and is it a ranking factor that impacts your website ranking on the SERPs.
The most popular search engine “Google” has never claimed that SEO word count directly influences your ranking and manipulates your website position on the ideal search engine result page. It may indirectly affect the website ranking to provide the target audience with the relevant and required information. The SEO word count should perfectly align with the topic that needs to be described to them, i.e., the SEO text should exceed or decrease with relevance to the blog post topic. If the topic requires a thorough explanation, the SEO word count will automatically increase, and for a snippet, it will generally be low.
Factors affecting the content word count
SEO word count is not a fixed paradigm or a brochure of instruction from Google to follow and apply in your blog post. There are many elements that influence the count of the SEO text used in your content and give an indication of its effect on your SEO blog or website ranking.
- Theme of the content – The topic that is to be described in the blog post is an excellent influencer in determining the SEO content word count. Different topic themes require a distinct way of explanation; some may require a detailed description, and some topics can be covered in short. For e.g., if your blog post topic is to write about the new Google analytics 4 update of Google, then it will require an extensive explanation so that the readers can get the proper information. If the topic is to write about a new mobile phone feature, it may demand fewer words comparatively.
- Need of the audience – The requirement of the target audience from your blog post and the time they are ready to allocate to read a piece of information directly affects the SEO word count, which is why it needs to be designed to enhance the user experience and fulfills their search intent.
- Medium of promotion – The audience reacts differently on diverse platforms, and their concentration varies accordingly. The level of seriousness in obtaining a piece of information differs from medium to medium. E.g., on social media, users will generally not read a lengthy blog post and scroll quickly, but if they are searching for a topic on a search engine, then they will probably give more time to read it. The ideal SEO word count on separate platforms for the same topic will be different from one another.
- Comparison with competitors – Analyzing the competitor’s content market strategy is essential to producing SEO-optimized content or the best content for SEO with an ideal word count. Looking at the competitors’ blog posts and their SEO text count will give the required insight into creating the best content with the ideal word count across different platforms.
- Number of keywords – The number of keywords a content writer chooses to use in their blog post also defines the length of the content. If they wish to utilize more keywords, they have to automatically expand the length of their SEO blog, which means the word count will increase.
Using long-form content for your SEO blog post
These are some of the critical factors that influence the word count in SEO content strategy. Consider using at least 2000 or more words in your blog post to provide the essential knowledge to the users. When you provide crucial knowledge on the discussed topic, the ideal word count generally exceeds 2000 words. There are several benefits of using long-form content because it is often impossible to pass the required and optimum knowledge to the target audience.
The top 10 positioned blogs have an average word count of 2000, which clearly indicates what should be an ideal word count for your content.
- Long-form content indicates that you have the knowledge about the topic
Using long-form content in your blog post strengthens the authority of your website. It passes the message that the content writer has researched the topic and has the essential knowledge about it. When the target audience believes that they are surfing the right website for their search query, they spend more time on your blog, which results in a low bounce rate, ultimately benefiting the search engine optimization.
- Long-form content enables the placement of more keywords
Keywords are one of the essential elements in SEO, as well as pay-per-click. Writing long-form content allows the digital marketer to use more keywords and create SEO-optimized content. Also, it is very necessary to conduct proper keyword research and choose the relevant keywords to get results that are best for SEO.
- Long-form content makes it easy to insert infographic
You can’t win the ranking game using only text in your SEO content. Intelligent digital marketers understand the importance of infographics and design their content marketing strategy accordingly. They focus on balancing their blog post with text and visuals collectively because good visuals attract the user instantly just by a glance, while they need to go through the text to get an idea about the topic. This is the reason why using infographics is vital to boost SEO content marketing and how long-form content provides the scope of placing it in the blog to make it SEO-friendly.
- Long-form content gives adequate insight into the topic
It is very difficult to provide the target audience with sufficient knowledge about any topic in a few words. They might not get the proper idea about the topic, and you might lose the opportunity of making the best content for SEO. To create SEO-optimized content, the focus should be on giving the users adequate insight into the topic, which might not be possible using fewer words, which is why long-form content is recommended.
Though it is not a mandatory requirement and the length of the blog or the ideal content word count has not been defined by Google, it is recommended to produce long-form content but doesn’t just focus on the quantity. Quantity and quality both are essential in creating the best content for SEO.
Quantity vs quality: optimizing both
Your SEO strategy should not just revolve around quantity; the length of the content will still be ineffective if it is not providing quality information to the user. Managing both aspects efficiently is critical in making the content marketing strategy fruitful.
- Well-researched content – Well-researched content helps to manage both the quantity and the quality. If you have thoroughly researched the topic, it gives you a vast amount of standard content, enabling you to write more about it while taking good care of the quality.
- Choosing the right topic – The topic you choose to write about should be related to your field, and you must have the basic knowledge required to pen it down. To maintain the right balance between the quantity and the quality of the product, careful selection of the subject matter is necessary.
- Focus on what is trending – You don’t want to put all your energy into something that is outdated and doesn’t get many searches. The best content for SEO comes from trendy topics, and you’ll get enough data to write about it. This way, you’ll manage to optimize both the quantity and the quality of the content.
- Breaking the content into sub-parts – The best way to lengthen the blog or article and maintain its quality is to break it into sub-sections. This SEO strategy for content optimization will help keep the blog’s necessary & ideal word count and decrease the chances of the blog being monotonous. Breaking the content into sub-parts also helps concentrate more and focus on the divided parts separately, thus improving the quality of the content.
Although word count doesn’t directly affect the website ranking, it influences it in a very critical indirect way. For a good user experience, the content needs to be well-researched and the word count should be ideal, which is very much acceptable and it is best for SEO. What if the digital marketers focus on other SEO elements like intensive keyword research, choosing the suitable target audience, selecting the appropriate promotion medium, etc, and don’t really bother about the word count & the quality of content, still manage to get a high website ranking? well, not anymore.
E-A-T & the ideal content word count
Google, in its new E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) update, has made it very clear that it is going to give more weightage to the content of the website and check if the content can provide a good UX to the audience or not. Even though it is also not a measurable element, and there is no clarification regarding E-A-T being a ranking factor or not, there are strong speculations about it influencing the website ranking.
A digital marketing agency cannot calculate E-A-T but Google has its algorithms to measure this human-centric criterion of website ranking influencer, which needs to be strongly considered to reap the benefits of SEO by balancing the word count and the standard of content in your blog post or the website.
- Expertise – It is an essential requirement that an expert in the subject matter should author the content. An expert would provide the necessary and in-depth knowledge about a specific topic and justify the time spent by the user on your website by taking care of the ideal number of words. A specialist in the field knows how many words are required to explain a topic in a way that all the essential information is passed to the audience.
- Authoritativeness – Expertise makes the website authoritative and increases its credibility, making the SEO word count in the blog ideal and credible in the eyes of the audience & Google.
- Trustworthiness – Expertise increases authority, and authority builds trust. A website achieves trustworthiness by being transparent about the content writer and giving the necessary credentials. This way, the number of words used in the content automatically becomes ideal for the users because trust is there.
Final thoughts
There are no metrics or a guideline book to explain how many words are ideal for your content, and Google has never mentioned it as a website ranking factor. Deciding how many words to use for any topic is a difficult task. This is why understanding the other factors that influence the word count becomes so important to comprehend. However, it is an essential aspect of SEO because users are affected when they don’t get what they want in the content. Nobody wants a lengthy ten-page description of a topic that can be explained in brief and one paragraph for the topics that require thorough research and detailed explanation. There is always a choice for the website owners to outsource a good content marketing agency and hand over the complicated tasks of creating the content and selecting its marketing channel. With their expertise in this field, they already have all the knowledge about what kind of content will be SEO-friendly and how to give a positive boost to your website ranking.
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