Content length

Should I create long 1200+ features or short 700 words articles

[Mohore]

I was Googling this before coming here and found long content is being rewarded. My question, with short attention span, do the readers care about the length? My site is a brand new literary blog. so apart from interviews and book reviews, I can't write very long features. what is your suggestion?

[Leosghost]

Depends if your target audience is the illiterati ( fans of twitter and of articles less than 400 words ) or those who can read at better than kindergarten level..

[NickMNS]

1342 words no more no less. And be sure that the total number of characters does not exceed 6711.

[Mohore]

@ NickMNS why so?

[NickMNS]

I'm being facetious. As Leosghost mentioned above your content should be written to meet the needs of your target audience not in terms of the number of words.

[Mohore]

:) okay, get it.

[justpassing]

I was Googling this before coming here and found long content is being rewarded

Your can also find as many topics saying the opposite, and reporting that short content is outranking long one. All depend of the nature of the content, the audience it targets, as well as the devices on which it is accessed.

do the readers care about the length

As long as they get the information they are looking for; ... and it also depends of the kind of information dispatched.

[tangor]

Content is as long as necessary. There are no magic numbers, and certainly NO NUMBERS in word length as related to SEO! Myth!

It is true users these days have the attention span of gnats, and that is something to keep in mind. But if you wish to be accurate, complete, and authoritative, you will post the exact number of words necessary to cover a topic.

I write to make sure no one walks away wanting for more. Do the job.

[sunjun]

Will google love your blog which are telling the truth we all know,But you write them with 1500key words,who care,so does google.If it's really attractive and get a high CTR and stay a long time in your page,google will love it too.(Sorry for my poor language)

[4l4n4l4n]

I never saw any huge difference when posting content of different lengths. As mentioned, as long as the content is optimized and relevant it will rank, no matter of its word count.

[Dimitri]

I know there is a trauma from the thin content penalty from years ago, but just write your content, that's all. It's "silly" (no hard feeling) to go after the number of words. As long as the content answers the question, that's fine. Also, with Google's user profiling, for the same search query, it can be short content pages coming first for one type of users, and long ones for others. (you can't rank first for all users).

However "may be", it can be a good idea to have a sum up paragraph at the top, with the important information. Then followed by a deeper development of the subject. I don't know if Google values this, but I know that , from a user point of view, this can be interesting. People who just want a simple "answer", just have to read the first paragraph, and those interested in more coverage/explanation can read the remain.

[lucy24]

just write your content

“Say what you have to say, and then stop.”

[AshleyOwen]

In my opinion, the text should cover the topic and that's all. The length doesn't matter much for me. Well, at least untill it's a 7,000-words article with no useful content. The main thing is that the article itself should be informative.

[creeking]

how many words is one picture equivalent to? :)

[SocialSEO]

All the major players in SEO tend to be advising (and, themselves, similarly posting) long-form...

The last few studies I read cited insane numbers like 98% of the top 3 results across 1000+ high and medium competitive keywords were an average of 1500 or 1800 words or something, and the 4 through 7 were something like 1200-1500 words on average...

Brian Dean only posts one blog post per month, and remains on the top of G for Backlinko (never wavers) - but then again his posts are never under 3500 words, often well over 5k words (I think his longest single post if I recall correctly was over 10k)

Neil Patel rarely posts anything under 3k words

SeoBytheSea is also once a month on average, and roughly 5k words, they rank high..

SEORoundtable is an exception to that - theirs are usually Under 500 words, but they also post like 5+ times per day on average... so it's not really an apples to apples comparison

[tangor]

One has content, one has announcements, one has product descriptions, one has really long form (most of my stuff exceeds 25K, but like one a month!).

Your content is as long as necessary for the purpose for which it is created.

FORCING a site to x words can be detrimental.

There is no "rule" for number of words that will get you ranked #1. What WILL rank is CONTENT THAT IS SOUGHT/ANSWERS.

Where most mistakes on "content length" come from is failure to fully cover a topic, whatever it might be.

Back in the old days when I did custom websites for newbies (before I actually developed a real business doing this kind of thing back in the 1990s) I was well aware (from a print background) that the client's copy was incomplete.

"Hey, Joe ... is that all there is?"
"Sure! What more do I need?"
"Who, What, Why, Where, When and How. And any personal comments you might like to make. This is not 'Dick and Jane' or 'See Spot Run'."

Needless to say what most webmasters actually need is an EDITOR to make sure their content is "as long as it needs to be."

:)

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