Word count and ranking/traffic

[FrankSweeney]

Hello All,

Recently, a client of ours enlisted another firm to redesign their website, www.thepodhotel.com. The new site went live on February 20th. Since that date, we have seen a 30% drop in Google Organic traffic, year-over-year. Even a cursory glance at the site will tell you that there was quite a bit left on the table, from an SEO point of view. However, my question pertains to word count. The word count on the new site is quite a bit lower than the old site. How much value do you feel this has on rankings? Do you feel that, among the many other items that need to be addressed, we should be focusing on creating more copy?

I appreciate all of your input.

Frank

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

Unfortunately the site seems to be down right now, so I can't have a look (I'm getting a 500 unavailable error), but I would say that while copy is important to give Google an idea about the page's topic, copy for copy's sake is not necessary. In other words, as long as the page says enough to get the message across about what it's meant to convey, you don't need to add another 200 words for no reason.

That said, each page should contain a good paragraph or so of unique text in most cases. I don't love putting minimums on the number of words that should be used, but keep in mind that text presented as images, etc. should use a technique like CSS image replacement in order to show that text in a search engine readable format, i.e. HTML.

I would not be confident that this has caused your 30% drop in traffic unless the pages are now extremely void of unique content and could be seem as "duplicates" or near-dupes of each other as a result, or simply as not very useful. On the other hand, if there are SEO errors with the site already, a big drop in content will certainly not help.

Get that 500 error checked out!

[synicalx]

Hey Frank,

In my experience, an appropriate amount of copy on a page is generally beneficial to your SEO. By 'appropriate' I just mean a 'natural' amount of text for a given page - so for example a blog post might do really well having 1.5k+ words whereas a Contact Us page is only going to get value from a handful of words (NAP, etc).

I personally haven't tested this too much myself but going by what I've seen from the results of other people's testing and tinkering in this area, I'd be inclined to flesh out some of the pages with some copy that includes a sprinkling of whatever keywords you're gunning for. Having said that, you really want any copy on a site to be valuable to visitors - quality over quantity.

Hope that helps!

Cheers