How Lengthy Ought to search engine optimisation Content material Be?
Everyone has a number, but which one is correct?
There are tons of debates surrounding SEO. Professionals discuss everything. This is how it should be as we will never know the coding behind the Google ranking algorithm. Of all the debates, one that, in my personal opinion at least, is incredibly stupid is the one that surrounds the perfect length of SEO content.
Here’s the deal, there is new research done on X websites and numerous keyword rankings every year. We always see different results. In fact, every single study shows us a different result.
Some examples:
- In 2013, Medium reported that the ideal blog post length was 1,600 words.
- According to the Search Engine Journal, the ideal blog post length is 1,900 words.
- Buffer stated that the ideal length is 1,600 words.
How on earth is that possible? Why are all these results different?
Very easy.
The truth is…
There is NO ideal length for a blog post or article!
If you look at SurferSEO, the Recommended Average Length is an average of the best results for the keyword you are trying to rank. I’m telling you this because SurferSEO pegs the length perfectly. It is perfectly normal for the ideal length of an article to vary from subject to subject. It all boils down to one simple question: “What are you writing about?”
Let’s think about an elementary example. Let’s say you’re writing an article about breast cancer and you want it to be a complete guide. For example, let’s say you’re writing an article called “How long does it take to cook an egg?”
It is obvious which article needs to be longer. It’s a landslide. If you say the article about the egg should be longer, I’m just telling you that it takes four to five minutes to get a soft-boiled egg and 12 minutes to get a hard-boiled egg. This is your article. I just wrote it for you.
Of course, you can definitely add more content and try to help the reader more. However, the actual length of the content about the egg, the answer to the question in the title, is very small.
What about that “1,000+ Word Idea”?
The claim that good content must be more than 1,000 words long is legitimate and it is important to mention it. When writing content, you need to cover a topic and do it as fully as possible. This is next to impossible for most of the articles you write in less than 1,000 words. The reason the majority of articles in the top positions are longer than 1,000 words is because it will take you roughly that amount to cover everything you need to write.
The problem with too many words
Last night I was doing the SurferSEO average for a keyword in the SEO niche. The recommendation was 10,000 words. This is already eBook level.
To dominate the search engines, people started to write more and more and thought more was better. As a result, far too much irrelevant content was added to articles. One guy wrote the top 5 LED monitors, then another wrote the top 7, then another wrote the top 10, then the top 20, and so on.
One person did an interview with an SEO manager, then the idea came up of getting input from many and creating those great interview articles that would dominate social media sharing. So 5 specialists were interviewed, then 20, then 100 – I’m not kidding myself, I’ve seen several articles that were actually just a question answered by 50 to 100 people in the industry, all for some social impact Media. Basically, SEO specialists began to write more and more in this search for dominant rankings. This is not necessarily a great thing.
I recently wanted to cook something. I found a recipe and wanted to try it out. The problem was that so much additional content was being added that when I got to the recipe, I lost all interest in trying it at all.
Be extremely careful with the length of the content
Ultimately, the goal should always be to give the visitor what he expects. It is normal to go in-depth, but if you leave the subject, you will lose the visitor’s attention. From my point of view, this is very important:
- Deliver the promised information as soon as possible. (An introduction is perfectly normal and is of course expected.)
- Do not go into the relevant extras until you have submitted the information.
- Be extremely careful about organizing any additional content that you add to the page. It has to be completely relevant or you will lose your visitors.
SEO content should be as long as it needs to be to provide all of the information needed to cover the premise in the title. As simple as that.
