02 Mar How Important Is Word Count to Ranking?

The internet is a big wide world, and naturally, you want your business to have a significant presence on it. You want to top Google searches and maximize your marketing strategy with tools such as SEO optimization. We get it! But is word count on your blogs all that important? Many seem to brand word count as a brilliant digital marketing tool, as it used to be the case that 2000+ words of content would more or less guarantee you a higher ranking in Google searches. But in the year 2020, this is no longer the case.

Traditional Advice

For years now, a lot of SEO optimization theory has been pinned on hitting the 2000-word count benchmark. A study of SERP data from SEMRush in 2016 revealed that the average word count of a page on Google is around 1890, which for a while, made everyone believe that 2000 words were the golden rule to ensure ranking optimization. Since that study, Google’s algorithm has been updated, and now, in fact, tends to disfavor those articles that contain a lot of ‘waffle.’

The Key Lies Within the Content

Nowadays, word count is not massively important in the ranking world, and instead, it is quality and backlinks that harvest the most clicks.

Google’s latest algorithm update means that content-specific blogs rank higher than those that contain lots of buffers, simply because they are deemed more relevant. And, while word count itself is not necessarily a factor you should worry about with regards to ranking, it’s the backlinks that are prone to be built into long-form content that you ought to examine.

Naturally, the longer a piece of content is, the more likely it is to embed backlinks to support claims. Increasing the number of backlinks in content is one of the top ways to achieve a higher ranking in the modern era.

How to Get a Better Ranking

Beyond the fact that long-form content has a propensity to contain more backlinks, it is also imperative that the material is hyper-focussed, in-depth, and concentrated on the keywords that you want to rank highly. While not only being an exercise in good writing practice, making your content more focused and extensive is guaranteed to reward you with higher Google search rankings. It is almost natural that as you begin to revise how you write and cast a much more in-depth net with your article research that your keyword optimization will increase. However, it would help if you also tried to make a conscious effort to improve your keyword usage; it might seem like day one stuff, but merely making a list of the keywords you want to optimize your ranking for and having that list in view while you write is a great habit to develop and is sure to aid your search engine ranking.

Final Thoughts

All in all, word count isn’t particularly important in this day and age. What is essential and is something you should work on if you want to see real results, is content specificity and backlinks.