in this article, you’ll learn all about SEO word count.
As you’ll discover below, there’s a minimum word count for SEO you should follow for specific types of content as well as the best word count to aim for to improve your website’s rankings in the search engines.
By the end of this page, you’ll know how word counts affect search engine optimization and understand how long your content should be for SEO purposes. Consider this your ultimate guide to the top-performing SEO word limits.
SEO Word Count
SEO word count best practices include at least 1,000 words for standard blog posts, 2,000 words for long-form content, and 300-500 for news articles or product pages. These limits are the best word counts for SEO to help content rank higher in the search engines for relevant keywords.
Does Word Count Affect SEO?
Word count does affect SEO but it is not a direct ranking factor for the search algorithm according to Google. Higher word counts help increase the overall search engine visibility for a web page by helping it rank for more total search queries and not just a single keyword for SEO.
In a Google Search Central SEO Office Hours session, John Mueller explained there is no best word count for SEO per se: “From our point of view the number of words on a page is not a quality factor, not a ranking factor. So just blindly adding more and more text to a page doesn’t make it better.”
That statement makes sense because the words on the page actually matter for crawling and indexing purposes in the search engines. For example, adding 1,000 words of unrelated, generic, or “fluff” content to make your article longer than the top-ranking competitors will not have any impact on your keyword rankings or SEO visibility because the additional words are not adding to the expertise, trust, or authority (E-A-T) of the content.
While it’s true that writing longer content makes it easier for Google’s algorithm to figure out what your web page is about, the fact is you need to publish comprehensive information that also positions your content as an authority on the topic that enables your web page to rank for long-tail keyword variations in the search engine results pages (SERPs). See long tail vs short tail keywords for more details.