Word count refers to the number of words contained on a page and word count distribution refers to how pages with short and long content are dispersed across your site.

In order to get a sense of the words on a page that work to convey meaning, Oncrawl ignores common stop words (such as "a", "the", "of", "is"...) when counting the number of words on a page.

Even though word count is no longer a ranking factor, topic depth and quality is. Word count can often be an indicator of quality as "thin" content tends to be very brief. Word count can therefore still have an important impact on rankings for different sections of your site and it's critical to be able to identify if your site has thin content and where it could be.

Studies run by authoritative SEO companies have repeatedly found that long-form copy with more than 800 words have better chances to rank higher in the SERPS. It doesn’t just help you improve your SEO but it offers a more trustworthy brand awareness, boosts conversion and increases social engagement and authority.

When specific pages have a lower word count than usual for their content type, it may be a sign that something has gone wrong: server issues, missing product descriptions... Keeping an eye on word count can help you spot technical SEO issues on specific pages.

So, how can you check the word count of pages on your site? If you run a large blog or even if you want to check a few pages, it can be pretty time consuming to do this manually. With Oncrawl, you can easily access your word count distribution and your average word count by page depth. You can see how much rich content you have and its repartition by depth, by page group, and many other factors.

If you have potential thin content, discover whether it is concentrated in certain categories, or generalized across your entire site.

The average content length for a web page that ranks in the top 10 results for any keyword on Google is at least 2,000 words. The higher up you go on the search listings page, the more content each web page is likely to have.

And above all, visitors prefer long content that offers added value and qualitative information. A Moz study has shown that there is a direct correlation between the length of a post and the number of links it receives.

The same study mentioned above has shown that higher quality, longer content produces more engagement on social media and consequently increases your social signal.

Some SEO experts have found that content with more than 1,500 words tend to convert better. Keep in mind, however, that other elements like CTA, images or header also have an impact on coversion.

The more content your pages contain, the more likely you are to develop your long-tail keywords with different combinations of keywords, niche keywords, etc.

As the use of conversational queries and semantic search increases, the context and structure of in-depth content are more likely to contain responses to low-frequency searches, whether or not you intentionally targeted their specific search query.

We've seen a strong correlation between content length and crawl frequency:

Longer content, with more than 1,200 words, is crawled most often.

Thin content, with less than 150 words, is crawled less frequently and often not even indexed by search engines as this content does not offer much value to visitors.

Note: not all short content is thin content. Homepages, for example, are often short but high-value.