Content Marketing Blog mint

Content Marketing Blog

How Many Words? Depends on How Many Readers You Want!

Shifting Content Marketing Focus from Word Count to Reader Count

SEO writers have been trying to find the perfect formula for high SEO rankings for decades. One recent trend in SEO is long form content, articles that are 2,000 words and even longer. While there is evidence that long form content does get reader engagement and adds to your SEO ranking, it’s not essential for getting rankings. Shorter articles that are well written and relevant to your reader can rank just as well, even better than low-quality long form content. There’s no magic number for word count. Long form content shouldn’t be your goal. The goal is audience engagement.

Focus on Search Intent for Quality Content

High quality content isn’t about a specific word count. Excellent content resonates with the reader. When you provide high quality content, your reader shares it. Other websites link to your content. Maybe the reader leaves a comment. High quality content encourages the reader to read through other pages on your site. These things tell the search engine bots that your site is an authority on the subject and that you are providing relevant content.

Instead of working toward a specific word count, think about the reader and what is being searched for online. This can depend on your industry, your audience and your keyword. Great content serves the reader, not the business. Searchers want information fast. If your content doesn’t provide the right experience, then your audience will go to your competitor.

Create content that is comprehensive. Stay on topic without adding fluff. Don’t try to extend the content to hit an arbitrary word count by extending the content with generalizations or discussing content that is slightly related to the original topic. This confuses readers and search engines. Filling content to hit target word counts while sacrificing quality can even drop your ranking. Search engines don’t know which topic to rank your page for.

High quality content helps your readers get the information they want. When you do your part, the audience responds. If your website analytics don’t reflect audience engagement, then you need to look at where your content isn’t hitting the mark. Look back at what content is working and what isn’t. Use that information to drive future content posts.

Word Count Is a Myth

Although long form content has its place, high quality content is the name of the game in 2020. High word count isn’t going to be enough to maintain your ranking if it doesn’t meet the end goal of user experience. It sounds counterintuitive to put the answer to the question in the first paragraph. But online readers want the answer first. Make your content so engaging that they’ll want to keep reading. Tell your readers what you want them to do by telling them what steps to take, i.e. join your newsletter list, contact you for more information or make a purchase.

Keeping up with SEO algorithms and customer behavior can be an ongoing challenge. MintCopy, a content agency with the best SEO writers, can help you with a content strategy that will keep your readers coming back for more. We focus on quality, not quantity.

Use our online form to get in touch. You can also follow us on FacebookLinkedIn, and Twitter to stay up-to-date with the latest content marketing trends.

Resources

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/word-count-for-seo/348164/

Share


Recent Posts

Sheetal Pinto - 3/16/2023 00:00

Content Marketing Best Practices that Garner Attention

Remember the movie, “Field of Dreams”? It made popular the phrase, “If you build it, he will come”. Shoeless Joe and other baseball legends may have magically appeared on a cornfield-turned-baseball diamond. However, when it comes to content marketing, your audience will need more than a field of dreams to attract their attention. If you’re trying to get more traffic to your website, don’t wait for your local SEO efforts to direct your audience. Give them a hand with these proven content strategies.

Sheetal Pinto - 3/2/2023 06:00

How to Use a Pillar Page to Improve your Content Quality

Consider the dictionary meaning of ‘pillar’ – “a firm, upright support for a superstructure”, also defined as “a fundamental precept”. Your content marketing campaign is your ‘superstructure’ that requires a ‘firm, upright support’. That’s the key function of content pillar pages. Without these essential supports, your ‘content superstructure’ will neither stand strong, nor will it attract the right attention.

Sheetal Pinto - 2/23/2023 06:00

Two Proven Ways to Organize Products with Similar Keywords

In business, cannibalization typically refers to a loss of sales. A company introduces a new product that displaces sales of an older, usually more outdated, product. Instead of having an increase in sales, the market growth remains stable. What does this mean in the world of SEO and content marketing? Keyword cannibalization occurs when two products have similar keywords or phrases and confuses the search engines about which page is right for which query. Instead of competing with other businesses for search traffic, you’re competing with your own web pages. Here’s why keyword cannibalization is bad for business and how you can overcome it.

Sheetal Pinto - 2/9/2023 06:00

How to Optimize your Content for a Global Audience

The global market is much smaller than it once was.  Statista reports over 5 billion internet users globally, or about 63.1% of the population. Reaching out to a broader market can help your business grow, but it’s not as simple as updating your website in a new language and simply hoping your audience finds you through search.

Sheetal Pinto - 1/26/2023 06:00

How to Build a Functional Content Marketing Funnel

Most people don’t wake up and think, “oh, today is the day I buy my new mattress,” unless they’ve researched different brands and checked pricing at different stores. Modern customers often take their time with major (and even minor) purchases. Using that information about today’s shoppers can help you design a content marketing map, or funnel, that guides the customer to your product.

Sheetal Pinto - 1/12/2023 15:49

Draw Insights from Your Competitors' Success 

According to Ahrefs, organic search drives over 53.3% of global traffic. Creating an SEO strategy is key to increasing your reach through search. As you’re setting new SEO goals for 2023, it may be useful to analyze what is working for your competitors. Also look at what they’re missing, to build that effectively into your own SEO strategy.

Sheetal Pinto - 12/15/2022 15:14

5 Proven Ways to Improve your Website Ranking

The rules of SEO can often feel elusive, as if SEO is a great big experiment in which the parameters keep changing. Search engines keep updating the algorithm. User behavior is evolving and adapting to circumstances, all the time. You don’t have any control over how pages rank, or do you? Google will never share how it determines SEO ranking. Customers change how they search and shop. We may not fully understand the complexity of search engine algorithms, but we can test different elements of a webpage to see how customers and search engines respond to your content marketing strategies. It’s called split testing.

Sheetal Pinto - 11/24/2022 16:42

Good today and gone tomorrow! That is the way of trends in the world of SEO and content marketing. What may generate interest right now can fall out of favor due to the ever-changing search engine algorithms. What can you do to ensure that you’re up to date? One useful method is to utilize Google Trends to find useful metrics that help you stay relevant. To make your way to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), it’s important to use a variety of proven methods to create quality content. Read below to learn how Google Trends can help you gain insight on popular trends, seasonality, regional demands, and your competitors.

Sheetal Pinto - 11/10/2022 06:00

Revitalize, Refine, Repurpose

The Pareto principle is also known as the 80/20 rule. About 80% of your best results will come from 20% of your efforts. When you apply that to a creative endeavour like content marketing, you might be undervaluing some of your content creative efforts. It can be expensive to create content, from scheduling videographers, photographers, models, or even having quality copywriters write a blog post. Chances are that you have some valuable content that can be recycled or repurposed with a little elbow grease.

Sheetal Pinto - 10/27/2022 06:00

How to Create Content that Ranks Higher on the SERPs

With every Google update, there’s always some concern about page rankings. The most recent update, “helpful content,” is part of Google’s ongoing efforts to make sure that users get quality content in search results. If you’ve been using SEO best practices and providing content that is relevant and useful, you shouldn’t lose page rankings. It’s always a good idea to check your content marketing strategy and make sure it aligns with Google’s algorithm updates.