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Word Count distribution
Word Count distribution

Best practices for word count

Updated over a week ago

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

Even though word count is no longer a ranking factor, topic depth and richness is. Word count is often an indicator of this, as "thin" content is often very brief. Word count can therefore still have an important impact on rankings for different sections of your site.

And 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, boost conversion and develop social engagement and authority.

So how to 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 many 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.

Best practices for word count

Content is key

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 offer a real extra value and qualitative informations. Moz study has shown that there is a direct correlation between the length of a post and the number of links it receives.

Long posts engage better

Studies have given proof that enriched, longer content with produce more engagement on social media and so increase your social signal.

Rich content converts more frequently

Some SEO experts have found that content with more than 1500 words tend to convert better even if other elements like CTA, images or header also have an impact.

Long form copies feed your long-tail keywords

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

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

Crawlers return more frequently to long-form content

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

Longer content with more than 1200 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 doesn't offer much value to visitors. (But not all short content is thin content: home pages, for example, are often short but high-value.)

How to improve your word count distribution?

  • Write copy with at least 800 words.

  • Focus on long-tail keywords.

  • Enrich your thin content.

  • Optimize your top pages with rich and long content.

 

For any questions about word count distribution, feel free to drop us a line @Oncrawl_CS


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