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
-
Creating a Wiki page
Has anyone had any recent success with creating a Wiki page? I created a page that has been in Draft for 8 weeks waiting for a Wiki Editor to review and approve it. Perhaps someone here is has a more established Wiki account than mine and can help please? PS: Yes, I know a Wiki page doesn't hold much SEO value but it has not been created for SEO purposes
Content Development | | Marketing_Today1 -
Shortened page titles and changed urls to match, will this effect my page rankings?
In my recent crawl, I was given a bunch of 200 errors for having titles too long, i rewrote the titles and changed the URLs to match (using wordpress). I was then informed by my boss that changing the URLs like I did (www.website.com/abc ->www.website.com/xyz) may have changed our page rank for those pages and if so i should revert them to the old urls. There are about 14 titles in total that I made these changes to. Would it be quicker to change the URL's to their old names, or better for me to use 301 redirects to point the old urls to the new ones? Will either renaming the urls of the new titled blogs with their old titles or using 301 redirects have better SEO results? Does wordpress automatically make these redirects for me? When I click a link of the old urls I kept saved in a document it still goes to the page.
Content Development | | dclauser0 -
Guest Blogging - Home Page PR0
I have found a blog in my niche that accepts guest posts. However, the site is quite odd in that the homepage has a PR of 0 and all the other pages have a 2. I just wanted to check if it is still worth posting on this site as it looks suspicious to me. Thanks.
Content Development | | AAttias0 -
Too many links on page?
Hello, Can my rankings suffer if some of my inner pages have too many links/anchor text? Or would link juice just stop being passed after X amount of links? I have content on these inner pages, and it all flows. Thanks!
Content Development | | TP_Marketing0 -
Duplicate Text on Blog & Internal News Page
I have two places I post news for our company. Our blog - typically more informal posts
Content Development | | seo-hunter
mycompany.wordpress.com & Our news page - typically more newsworthy than the blog
mycompany.com/news My question is, It is okay to just copy the exact text from my wordpress blog and paste to my news area of my site and vice versa? Does this hurt ranking potential for either page?0 -
Duplicate Page Content WordPress blog with categories?
Just got a crawl report back from SEOmoz and it gives me lots of errors for "duplicate page content". Upon investigating, I notice this is because my WP blog is setup into categories so the home page is almost identical to one of the category pages. None of my actually posts are the same but the category pages have some overlap since the same post could show up in two or more categories. Is this a problem or can I just ignore this error? Any thing I should be doing differently? Thanks!
Content Development | | frankthetank20 -
Content being copied from our product page hurting our site overall?
On our product pages, he have short descriptions and some bulleted lists. Resellers of our products, and many other sites who are not resellers are copying this content, often verbatim. While I'm not as concerned for the product pages themselves as we're hoping the category pages will rank, does this duplication of our content hurt our site overall? FWIW, our brand name is in our domain and often also shown on these sites that copy the content.
Content Development | | minutiae0 -
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