Why Word Count is Important for SEO

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Why worry about Word Count?
• Find the right balance
• Conclusion

Introduction

In today’s competitive digital world, to stand out online with search engines and social media you need to take care of multiple factors that influence your website’s ranking on search engines. Rankings on search engines are often called SERP (Search Engine Result Pages), and word count is one of the major factors affecting your SERP rankings.

In this blog post, let’s understand how word count impacts your SEO score.

Why worry about Word Count?

While there are no fixed rules when it comes to SEO as search engines like Google, Bing, keep changing their algorithms to rank the most relevant and valuable results for the users. Some evergreen rules work with SEO, word count being one of them. Word count as a metric helps determine the depth of your page. The more relevant word count you have on your page, signifies that your website has in-depth content written on the topic.

Let’s explore few reasons on why you should care about word count when it comes to SEO :

• Content Authority: Longer articles in-general offers a more comprehensive coverage of the topic that you are writing for. When you have written thoroughly explained content, then it signals your website to be an authoritative and expert source for the subject, which potentially leads to a higher ranking. More in-depth content also satisfies the user intent, and makes the user spend more time on your page - this signals a lower bounce rate and longer session duration, both of which are very positive metrics for SEO.
• Keyword Optimization: Longer content usually allows you to have a broad range of sub-topics within your page. As search engines explore your content, they identify a larger set of keywords and makes it easy for the search engine to get a complete context and relevance of your page on the subject. A higher word count allows you to fit in more keywords strategically without spamming keywords here and there. This again improves the chances of a better ranking with search engines.
• Potential Backlinks: When you write comprehensive articles that offers expertise of the subject, it attracts more backlinks from other authoritative websites. Longer, well-researched and expert content pieces are more likely to be cited by other relevant websites, social media handles and sources. Backlinks from good authority websites, and social media handles are crucial for SEO, as they hint towards the credibility and authority of your web page.

You can check your website’s word count by using the following tools : MathExact Word Count Checker

Find the right balance

Writing long detailed articles can be a double-edged sword, you have to find the right balance. While web pages with higher word count tend to perform better in terms of improving SEO, it might affect several other important metrics. Stretching out content without much value can affect your SEO badly.

When you are writing long articles, ensure that :

1. Your content should be readable by the users in a maximum of 5-7 minutes. That’s the average time a user spends on reading a blog post or an informative web page.
2. Focus on high quality and engaging content, even if it means reducing the word count on your pages. High-value content attracts more users, and significantly improves SEO of your website.

Conclusion

As we mentioned before, in an ever-evolving world of SEO it’s hard to keep up with every change that happens on the search engine algorithms. However, by understanding the importance of word count and then strategically using it to your advantage can increase the chances of a higher ranking and more organic traffic.