Summary
I learned that Google's official stance is that word count is not a ranking factor. However, always take Google's statements with caution, as they have made claims in the past that weren't entirely accurate.
Fulfill search intent first; it's more critical than the number of words. If someone searches for something specific like a "script timer," provide exactly what they need. Understanding and addressing user intent can help you create effective pages.
Quality content is key. With AI being able to produce content now, make your work stand out by making it unique and in-depth. Combining human effort with AI can yield excellent results.
For e-commerce, sometimes fewer words are better. For terms like "blue prom dresses," aim to match search intent with options and filters rather than just text.
Use basic on-page SEO practices like including the primary keyword in the title, meta description, and URL. This can help boost your content's visibility on search engines.
The depth of content matters for complex topics. Long-form, detailed content can perform better when the subject requires comprehensive information, like in "SEO tools for agencies."
Unique content, or information gain, is crucial. Include elements that can't be found elsewhere, which adds value and can improve rankings significantly.
Backlinks are still a strong signal for SEO. They act as votes for your content and overall brand. Longer content often attracts more backlinks, especially when it's data-driven or includes unique tools.
Branded searches play a role in SEO performance. Monitoring the number of branded search queries can provide insights into your brand's authority and how it may influence search rankings.
Video
How To Take Action
I would suggest focusing on understanding and addressing user intent first. If you're a small business owner or entrepreneur, make sure the content you create gives people exactly what they're searching for. For example, if your customers are searching for "cheap red sneakers," ensure they find a selection of red sneakers at a good price on your page.
A good way of doing this is to start with quality and unique content. With AI being able to churn out lots of writing, your content should stand out with unique insights or experiences. If you use AI, mix it with your human touch to create something special and genuine.
For your website, use basic on-page SEO practices. Put the main keyword in your title, meta description, and URL. This helps search engines find and list your pages better.
For complex subjects or industries, like digital marketing tools, longer and detailed content is more effective. Dive deep into the topic so your content becomes a go-to resource.
Backlinks are like votes for your content. Aim to get links from other trusted sites pointing to yours, as this signals to search engines that your content is reliable.
Branded searches are important too. Monitor how often people search for your brand by name, as it indicates your popularity and influence. Use these searches to gauge how well-known and trusted your brand is becoming.
Pick the strategies that fit your business or personal goals best, and adjust as you learn and grow.
Quotes by Author
"Word count is not a ranking factor"
"Fulfilling the intent is the most important thing"
"It's not about the length, it's about really the depth of that content"
"The field has been leveled, anyone can create content now"
"No one knows for sure what signals Google is using externally to ultimately determine what's a good brand"
Full Transcript
so does word count actually matter for SEO in this video I'm breaking down the data Google's official stance and real world case studies to answer this once and for all let's get right into it so let's start with Google's official stance on word counts so John Mueller has in the past said and this is a very very old tweet you can tell it's from six years ago word count is not a ranking Factor save yourself the trouble take what Google says of the grain of salt when we look throughout history Google has said a lot of things that have turned out to not be true so you got to be very very careful but in this one context in this one regard I actually have a lot of evidence that this is actually true so let's talk about what matters more than just the quantity of words number one is fulfilling intent this is the most important thing and that is why it's the first one I'm mentioning here which is we need to identify the correct page the correct structure of that page and the correct asset to serve up to that Searcher so that they get exactly what they came for so the first example is this script timer and so I created this when chat gbt first came out and it's still ranking to this day for script timer but the funny thing is I only built this page just to test some of the SEO theories that I had and one of those theories that I wanted to test was if you build a tool that properly fulfills the intent that you don't really need a lot of words on the page to wank that was my theory and so what I did to actually test this and this has been a multi-year test just to confirm this variable but what I did is I actually had a huge block of text below here so at first I had just this like just the tool then I added a huge block of text and I kept that for a really long time and then I removed that text and so I'll show you evidence of this and proof of this here in a second but what I want to tell you first is that fulfilling the intent if someone is searching script timer you give them a script timer you give them exactly what they came for and you'll be able to prove that you've done a good job if you have user tracking software set up because you'll be able to see how the users are engaging with that page but at the end of the day have to you have to become a master of understanding intent and if you understand intent you can always create the right page with the right structure that's going to help you the user in the best way possible sometimes it's a free resource like this where they can you know use it other times it is a deep Lev asset which I'll be showing you here in a second where there there's a lot of detail and a lot of depth that absolutely is necessary for some keywords and other times it's totally based on just driving conversions second one is on the e-commerce level so I know have a lot of people that do e-commerce SEO that follow me so here's a small example this is for the keyword blue prom dresses Okay so you can see the optimal word count here all right and so inside of rankability this optimal word count is the median word count this is not the average word count and so that's a really important piece because when you look at the the ranking results you'll see occasionally there's a competitor with you know 296 words and then you also have a competitor that has nearly 3,300 words on their page so you don't really want to get an average because you're going to get this really inflated number and so we know we need words on the page that is critical but it's more of the debate is how much do you actually need and I personally believe that's going to largely vary depending on the other variables that you've taken care of so if you have a really strong website that's highly trusted has a good link profile has a good brand you may not need to be that aggressive on the work count side you still want to have that depth and quality but at the end of the day if you've got some stronger variables working for you you don't need to be as aggressive on that front so the point is is like a page like that's a category page like this we'll go and look at this one you'll see you really don't need a whole lot of content on this page because it is fulfilling the intense someone looking for blue prom dresses is trying to figure out what is the best prom dress for them specifically and and they've actually kind of given us a little bit of Intel knowing that it is blue so we at least know the color that they want but from here we got to kind of narrow it down and get this user to to self select and so that's why now we've got the filtering mechanisms and all these good things that come along with this page so this is a great commercial page and notice there's not a whole lot of huge blocks of text or paragraphs or anything like that this is a very trusted brand it's very powerful let's not pretend that it isn't but at the same time this is the general structure that can work you don't need a massive amount of words what you need to do is you need to match the intent and that is the most important thing that you could do so after we fulfilled intent the next most important thing is the quality of the content so you hear it all the time it's pretty cliche at this point about creating quality content but it's true because in this current day and with AI anyone can create create content and in fact anyone can create pretty decent content so what we need to be thinking more is about is how do we make our content Stand Out Among this flood of AI content and the truth is the only way to really beat AI content is you're going to have to put more effort into that content and so when there's more effort that generally is going to increase the quality so I've tested pretty much every AI content detector and this is one of the best original. a there's also a few others but this is the one that consistently does a good job of identifying AI content now I'm not someone who believes that you know you should whether you should a use AI content or not this is more for me about what's most effective and based on many many studies and many tests of my own anecdotally running all kinds of keywords through AI using AI content using human written human written content almost always outperforms I'd say the large majority of the time really high quality human written content seems to be really high quality AI content okay that's just that's just how it is now there is a middle ground there where you can combine both together and get this hybrid that actually works really really well but what I highly recommend doing is just thinking more about how do we make the content original how do we make it unique that's the key it doesn't matter whether you use AI or human what matters that the content is unique and so obviously if you use human written content you don't have to worry a lot about you know trying to trick the algorithms or use sketchy tactics because it's human written so you've already dealt with that what you need to but when I talk about more about originality uniqueness I'm talking about the depth of that content and so when you look at this one this is a really high quality piece of content that goes incredibly deep on a super narrow topic and it's not super long but it's incredibly deep and complex and properly fulfills the intent of this keyword so that's what we're going for it's not about the length it's about really the depth of that content so after you fulfill the intent you have quality content the next most important piece is that basic onpage SEO so when I talk about basic onpage SEO it's quite simple we've got the primary keyword in the title we've got the primary keyword in The Meta description we've got it in the URL and we usually have it in the H1 and ideally you could get it in one of the H2S I would also if if this was you know my page I would also like to get it in the first sentence first couple of Senses let's say the first 100 words so now with those big variables out of the way the next most important one is just the relevance of your page so I already showed you some examples of assets where it didn't have massive word counts you saw the script timer you saw the category Pages for Ecom but here's an example where depth is required okay so when you look at the competitors for this SEO tools for agencies this is a serious topic and when you look at the content or the pages that are ranking word count is significant in many scenarios here and what this is telling us is that you're just not going to be able to come in here with some little short piece of content that talks about maybe one or two tools you're just it's just not going to work in this scenario so you need to come here and there needs to be a certain level of depth there's a certain requirement that you have to meet to even have any chance to show up here and so this is why for these longer form assets you're going to need to really bring your aame and that's why you want to make sure you're filling in all these topics but there's a bare minimum that you want to hit here as far as relevance and then you want to bring in the next piece of this puzzle which is that information game so you can get all the other things right and do very very well but if you want to take your pages to the next level you want to try to rank number one consistently across all the keywords you're going after the next piece you really need is Information Gain which really is just a fancy phrase for Unique content adding elements into your content that cannot be found anywhere else so just to give you an opposite example here's a keyword where we're ranking where we do not have a good score okay so when you look at this the rankability score is a seven I would not recommend this in nine out of 10 situations I would say no don't do this cover the topic in full do what you need to do but the reason why I believe we can get away with this is because we're really tapping into the Information Gain element same URL uh but new data fresh data and also data that no one else has this is that is unique to us we did this study independently and so this is a perfect example of how you can go and collect your own data to tap into this Information Gain element now keep in mind you don't need to worry about the geeky SEO terminology all you need to know is creating content and elements in your content that no one else has if I wanted this page to get more organic traffic what I would do is I would come in here and I would look at these topics that I'm not hitting on okay because this is the thing I think sometimes this gets misinterpreted so you can rank really well for your keyword phrase and this this page is structured well to rank for this exact phrase but it's not structured well to capture all organic search traffic and longtail traffic for this one topic okay and the only way you can do that is you have to start to attack these other topics to start to capture the longtail traffic because if I'm not even talking about these things I've got zero chance of capturing any traffic for for these now you can get all of those things right but if you don't get user experience right then you're going to be in some trouble because we have to actually get users to read our content consume our content use our assets use the things that are on this page because those signals are being tracked by Google and so if if users are landing and they're bouncing back to Google or they're exiting super quickly that's not always necessarily a bad thing but in most cases if they're leaving very quickly and not actually scrolling or consuming or going to a second page then we're going to be in some trouble so we need to optimize for user experience so going back to the script timer from earlier in the video this is what I want to show you is when you have this beautiful user experience data you can get confirmation that you're doing the right thing that you're fulfilling the intent you're giving the users what they came for and you're helping them achieve their goals that's what we're trying to do with our pages and so when you have this data you have evidence that you're doing a good job or doing a bad job it could go either way but the point is like this is what you want to see and this is all click data and you look at where these clicks are isolated this is exactly what we want this is the exactly what we're going for because this means users are coming in here and they're using this tool that's what it's designed to do it's designed to be used they're doing what they need to do and so I proved this already that when I remov that content below the fold it was very long couple thousand words I removed that content and guess what happened to the rankings for script timer it did not move it didn't go up right it didn't go up in performance but it didn't even decline in performance nothing happened at all and I just literally deleted all the content they had no effect because the thing is it's about the user experience and this is once again even more proof that Google is tracking this Google is using this in the algorithms and it does matter so once you've got all these other variables right the next most important piece of this equation is your overall website author and direct backlinks going to the page you're trying to rank this is the most important part of SEO and the thing is like I mentioned before in this video anyone can create content now so the the field has been leveled so how is Google going to figure out who should rank who's going to how is Google going to determine who should rank number one two three and Beyond well they need to start to look externally they can't just look at content and so they're going to look at these external signals and one of the best signals that to the day they still have not been able to get away from is just backlinks it is such a powerful signal it's a vote for your content it's a vote for your brand it's a vote for your website and so if you don't have them it really can be detrimental to your overall SEO performance so there is some evidence that longer content does tend to attract more backlinks how-to content checklist stuff like that isn't actually the best for acquiring links it certainly can acquire links but what tends to acquire the the best links is data driven content tools free assets sometimes controversial stuff there's a lot of different angles of outperform just general how-to content now keep in mind this is saying long form content so a long form piece of content could be a super data driven piece of content that's very long form right so this isn't just apply to just your traditional listicles or you know how-to pieces of content and ironically this content that that was created on back Linko this is a data driven piece of content right highly data driven and this has attracted an enormous amount of backlinks okay so the angles are there you can see them but I can tell you just pure informational content doesn't do as well as something like this so there is evidence that you know creating deep level assets can work but it has to align with the appropriate Angle now one thing you can do is you know when you create an Assa like this you go and do Outreach and you acquire links to that asset but you can also just Outsource a lot of your link access to digital. PR which is a search intelligence company and they will do a lot of this heavy lifting for you and in fact they actually can create the assets for you so you don't actually have to build these out yourself as you can imagine you know at back Linko this probably took them 40 maybe a 100 hours or more to build this um and so if you don't want to make that time investment and you don't have the time youve already the energy to go and do this because this is very very hard uh you can actually Outsource this to digital dop PR so highly recommend them I'll have a link below the video but you can also just go to digital. PR to learn and the final piece of this equation is your overall brand Authority now there's a lot of kind of indirect ways to measure this but one of the most direct measurements we can use is just the amount of branded searches that you're getting for your brand and so the last piece of this equation if you're not getting the the SEO performance that you want you're doing all these other things I talked about really really well you may want to look at your just overall brand Authority and no one knows for sure what signals Google is using externally to ultimately determine what's a good brand versus a you know not so good brand of course we're looking probably looking at reviews that's probably a part of the equation but one of the big elements that they're likely using are branded searches so you can go into hress you can go into Sam rush and you can just see the Branded searches and in general no one knows like how many branded searches are going to influence the algorithm like no one knows that for sure but but in general it's probably better to have them right so you just need to have branded searches you can actually go into Google search console and see this as well um but when you look at this you'll see like semrush gets 178,000 searches a month HR gets 92,000 searches a month so this is really really good and these are positive signals that likely will influence your SEO performance so that's all for this video thank you so much for watching and if you like this video please like it and subscribe for more free free SEO training coming up here very soon and if you want to take your SEO content to the next level then I highly recommend signing up for a free 7-Day trial of rankability thanks again for watching
