How Long Should My Content Be?
There’s one golden rule about internet marketing and SEO that I constantly tell anyone who will listen:
Content is king.
It was true five years ago. It’s true right now. And it’ll be true 10 years from now.
Back in the early days of blogging and even up until a couple years ago, bloggers and webmasters would flood their sites with spammy content to try and rank for keywords. They’d jam their keywords in and unnaturally shoehorn them into these short 300-500 word blog posts as many times as possible in an effort to trick Google into ranking their pages higher.
Google, in its infinite wisdom, eventually caught on and put a stop to this practice. Now, it’s the quality of the content that matters.
Google takes a number of things into consideration for how it determines content quality, but there is one piece of criteria that sits pretty high in the hierarchy:
Content length.
What does Google want?
There’s a current theory that a piece of content has to be roughly 2,000 words long for Google to even consider ranking it on the first page of search engine results. This is sort of true, but not really.
What I mean by that is that if you’re only focused on word count and try to pump 2,000 words solely to meet that threshold, odds are your content is going to be crap.
Furthermore, Google breaks down its search engine results rankings by industry. So if you’re writing a piece of content for a travel blog, Google isn’t going to want to see a 4,000 word article on what to do in Fiji.
People searching for travel and tourist information want videos, photos, and stories where they can imagine themselves on a tropical island – they don’t want to hear you ramble on and on for 8,000 words describing a coconut and rum cocktail.
Build a brick house, not an outhouse
The hard truth is that if you’re starting a new site from scratch and want to start ranking on Google, you’re going to want to start out writing long form articles.
Why?
Every house needs a solid foundation, that’s why.
When you start off creating high quality long form articles that go into gritty detail of the hows and whys of your particular industry, you’re creating linkable assets.
Linkable assets are pieces of content that other relevant sites can link back to, thus giving you that coveted “link juice” that Google also takes into consideration when it comes down to ranking search engine results. Your mission is to collect as many of these backlinks as possible.
This brings us back to the idea of producing high quality content in the 2,000 word range instead of pure crap. Because not only are other sites going to be linking to your great content, you’re going to link other pages on your site back to your own content to keep people on your page and reduce your bounce rate – yet another piece of criteria Google takes into account when ranking search results.
The pillars of content
Once you have a solid foundation of 2,000+ word high quality content, you can then start writing shorter, more specific and niched down blog posts that link back to your longer pieces.
This practice has a lot of names from “content siloing” to “pillar content” and it doesn’t matter what you call it as long as you do it. Because it works!
I’ve seen bloggers take a general topic and write a blog post that contains upward of 15 chapters. They then create smaller posts on specific topics brought up in that sprawling article that link right back to the 15 chapter piece of content.
You’re essentially creating a pillar or tower of content around a broad topic (the 10,000 word bottom of the pillar) that reaches up to the tiniest, most specific topic (the 500 word tippy top of the pillar). Those word counts aren’t etched in stone, but you’ll see how they do average out to around 2,000 words per post, which is where the whole word count theory comes from.
But I digress.
This strategy of producing pillar content not only provides your site visitors with an extremely valuable wealth of information, it also keeps them on your site and potentially makes a customer or follower out of them.
And that is the endgame here – never forget that!
Get started NOW
We’ve talked a lot about how long your content should be in general terms, but as I mentioned, Google breaks its rankings down by industry.
So how long should your content be in your particular industry? Google it!
Seriously.
Think of a topic you want to write about and then Google it. Take a look at the first 10 search results and see what the word count is for each article.
Now make yours longer and better by taking the information already available and adding to it.
Videos, infographics, photos, and personal anecdotes are always great for creating shareable, engaging content.
If you’re ready to start blogging, get to it!
If you need some help, we can help you. Just click the button below and we can get the ball rolling.
