‘Word Count’ – Is that important?

Word Count is still considered to be one of the important factors in SEO. Most of the SEO people recommend writing an in-depth article with word count more than 1000. If you use any SEO tool for on-page SEO audit, it will also low word count for pages with word count less than 300 words. This gives the impression that word count is important. But, is word count really important? In this article, I will talk on the same topic.

SEMrush, SERPStat, and Seomator are some good SEO tools that give you an idea of why your website is not performing well. There are also several tools like DeepCrawl and ScreamingFrog which crawl websites to find potential issues. These sites basically look for structural issues and report if they find on-page SEO issues. All tools give importance to word count. But don’t freak out if any of your pages fail the word count test.

Word Count matters but not the way most people think. Before I talk more about Word Count, let’s see what Google’s John Mueller thinks about it.

Recently John Mueller tweeted on the same thing. Here’s is the exact tweeted.

He clearly mentioned that having the word count similar to the top-ranking page on the same topic won’t help you in ranking better.

This tweet has a deep meaning. So, don’t take it word by word. Here, John Mueller is not saying that the word count isn’t important. The basic idea of SEO still revolves around the quality of the content.

Content is the foundation of every SEO strategy. So, it is really important. There have been several studies that indicate larger content works better and helps the website to show up in search results. According to Forbes, pages with less than 300 words can be considered as a page with thin content. SEMrush also used SERP data to confirm that the average Google first page result contains 1,890 words. It shows that larger content works better. But all these reports always talk about quality content while talking about word count.

I have seen a lot of blog posts that are longer than 5000 words but mostly you will find overwritten content. Most of the sections in the content are unrelated and were added just to increase the word count. This kind of word count won’t help. Writing content just to reach an arbitrary word count will surely drop the quality of the content.

I always advise people to stay relevant while writing about something. I also recommend a minimum of 300 words per page. More words are always better. But avoid putting copied content and adding irrelevant content. Use Keyword research tools to find related keywords and put everything into one to write an in-depth article. Always try to get a high word count but only by adding relevant content. You can include insights, findings of reports, your opinions to achieve higher word count but don’t put arbitrary words. If you really put efforts in writing a long in-depth article with valuable content and opinion, it not just work well in search engines, but also brings you some natural backlinks.

Sometimes short content also solves purpose and there is no need to put more content just to increase the word count. You can take the example of several popular news websites where most of the articles hardly reach to 300 words count. Still, articles rank well. Yes, I know these sites have high authority to rank well, but they also have a competition to beat.

Also see: Best Blogging Tools I Use and Recommend

Next time when you are writing the content, focus on offering quality. GO with Optimized H1 and content that answers people’s queries. If you want higher word count, do proper research on the topic and add only relevant data.

If SEO tools are showing low word count warning, improve the content quality. Don’t just add some words to remove that warning.

Word Count matters but only if your words matter.

Deepanker

I am a tech blogger, traveler, and entrepreneur