How Many Words in Content for Good SEO?
-
I have heard it's best to have 400+ words of content for strong SEO per page. I believe this is true for the most.
I have a project in mind, however, that I am considering doing 100-200 words of content per page. This is for a glossary of terms for my industry, where I have a unique page for each term that describes what that term means w/ 1 image and a few links to related products.
Is having just 100-200 words going to be enough? Each page will still be unique, original content.
Or is it best to really try for longer articles?
In other words, is there a general rule for # of words per page for search engines to see the page as valuable and unique and to give it good ranking?
- Give me a BIG THUMBS UP if you found this question useful. It won't cost you anything! Thanks!
-
This site gets a lot of image search traffic. I can not tell you if the captions assist with that traffic. But I do know that kickass images on a same-topic page will get traffic.
-
I have a hunch that part of the Google Algo is how long people spend on a page, and lots of big pretty pictures along with text entices people to look at said pretty pictures thus stay on each page longer while reading.
-
Very informative on the added content getting long tail traffic. How did the images help though? Was it just the "content captions"?
Utah Tiger
-
Thanks, EGOL. That confirms what I'm thinking.
You mentioned image captions. I don't normally use them - do they help? I'm assuming this is for blog posts if its captions?
-
Just saying what happened here...
I had about 80 pages about topics that are similar to glossary entries.
I tossed them up with an image and two sentences. That was 3 or 4 years ago. Some of them ranked on the second or third page of google and they pulled a little traffic. Not much traffic a few visitors per day for most of the pages.
Then, after a year or two I started upgrading them to a couple paragraphs and one or two nicer, larger images with captions. Within a couple of months rankings went up (I don't build links on this site). Some of them were on the first page of google but most not. Traffic shot up like a rocket. Not that much from a ranking increase but because now there were lots more words on those pages and they interacted with queries to bring lots of long tail visitors. The result was each of these pages started pulling a few dozen visitors each day.
Now, I am slowly upgrading these pages to articles of 500 to 3000 words and three to twelve images with generous captions, some with data tables some with a video. Rankings on the ones that I have improved moved up significantly and are now in the top 5 of google. Traffic on the pages that I have improved now hits a few hundred visitors per day per page. I am working on another one today.
Bottom line... When compared to trivial content, substantive content pulls in lots more long tail traffic and will sometimes rank a little better on the basis of the richer content alone. An investment in richer content will immediately increase your traffic.
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
-
Having 2 brands with the same content - will this work from an SEO perspective
Hi All, I would love if someone could help and provide some insights on this. We're a financial institution and have a set of products that we offer. We have recently joined with another brand and will now be offering all our products to their customers. What we are looking to do is have 1 site that masks the content for both sites so it appears as there are 2 seperate brands with different content - in fact we have a main site and then a sister brand that offers the same products. Is there anyway to do this so when someone searches for Credit Card from Brand A it is indexed under Brand A and same when someone searched for Credit Card from Brand B it is indexed under Brand B. The one thing is we would not want to rel:can the pages nor be penalised by googles latest PR algorithm. Hope someone can help! Thanks Dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFCU1 -
SEO Adjustments Where Content Isn't Front And Centre...
So I am wondering what people think for a SEO strategy for sites where (1) the interaction is a one-off event and (2) content is not often shared or something that people want. Specificially regarding two sites this applies to: Site 1 is basically a mortgage site. So customers interact with the site once and then most likely never again once their mortgage is sorted. Mortgages aren't great content pieces and customers don't really read a lot of the content - it's part of the reason loan officers/mortgage professionals exist... Site 2 is also for a one off purchase but it's an embarrassing problem that nobody would share content for because they don't want people to know that they sought help for this. This also makes getting backlinks hard. Also it is a one off purchase, never to be made again... Am interested in how people would adapt their SEO strategies to these circumstances - where content development and promotion is limited...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GTAMP0 -
Duplicate content, the distrubutors are copying the content of the manufacturer
Hi everybody! While I was checking all points of the Technical Site Audit Checklist 2015 (great checklist!), I found that the distrubutors of my client are copying part of the content to add it in their websites. When I take a content snippet, and put it in quotes and search for it I get four or five sites that have copied the content. They are distributors of my client. The first result is still my client (the manufacturer), but... should I recommend any action to this situation. We don't want to bother the distributors with obstacles. This situation could be a problem or is it a common situation and Google knows perfectly where the content is comming from? Any recommendation? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite0 -
SEO Consult?
Is there anyone here that I can pay to give me a deep analysis of my website and my competitors with recommendation on what to do? I am a small business and I cannot afford expensive monthly SEO fees. I can probably afford a one time consult fee, then I can do the work myself. Or maybe I can pay a-la cart for some of the fixes. I understand this may not be something SEOs want to do since they make their money off doing the work and may not want to share trade secrets. I just thought I would throw that question out there. I've been working on trying to SEO my site for a year now... I was improving and happy with my progress until October and lost 30 positions over my tracked keywords. I have no idea why. I'm kind of at my wits end! 😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CalicoKitty20000 -
Duplicate Content: Organic vs Local SEO
Does Google treat them differently? I found something interesting just now and decided to post it up http://www.daviddischler.com/is-duplicate-content-treated-differently-when-local-seo-comes-into-play/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daviddischler0 -
Website Layout and SEO
Hi All, As a brand new user to Wordpress and having read articles and forum posts I have purchased Studiopress Genesis Enterprise Theme. QuestionWordpress like any traditional bespoke site can be written to incorporate variations of columns structures.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
What is the best column strategy or page layout strategy for SEO? Thanks Mark0 -
How to optimize an about page for SEO. Best practices? Word count?
Does anyone have any advice on word count and best practice SEO for a blog about page or even a website about page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jdodd0 -
Pagination & SEO
I have the WP-Pagination plugin and I am wondering how to handle duplicate content issues and what's best for SEO. My developer initially downloaded the plugin to speed up loading for the home page. Now my home page has 21 pages of paginated content. But the pagination continues with each of my categories as well. Should I be placing a canonical reference to my home page, or category main page? My site name is gracessweetlife (dot) com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gracessweetlife0