How many words do you need on a page for SEO?

Of course there is no single, magic answer to this question, it depends. But the aim of this test was to find a definitive sweet spot of words on a page, a quantity that Google generally is rewarding more than any other, removing the factor of context, which of course in reality is impossible, all your web pages exist in the context of other pages on the web.

Regardless, this is still an interesting experiment to conduct. Over 3 months we ran tests with between 100 and 4,000 words. In this blog post you will finally find out how many words Google is generally rewarding, which we think is a handy factoid for your SEO tool belt.

We set up the test like this..

In order to find the optimal number of words on a page, we built numerous test pages with the counts separated out: 100-200, 200-300, etc. After running several tests with  between 100 and 4000 words, we formulated the hypothesis that a page containing 1300 words was the approximate optimal word count. The final test was run using a range of 1100-1450. We were hoping to narrow the range further, perhaps even confirm somewhere between 1100-1300 words as the number, however, the results were not consistent enough to say that we’d found the perfect number of words.

Here is what we discovered

The results indicate that Google is more concerned in the macro or in a particular range, rather than nailing down a single number. However, we can learn from these tests that somewhere between 1100 and 1600 appears to be the sweet spot as a rule of thumb. We would still shoot for around 1300.

Final Takeaway

As a final word on this, your SEO pages don’t exist in a vacuum, each keyword lives in its own unique competitive environment. Use a tool such as Page Optimizer to gain insights into the specific word count that is being rewarded for that specific keyword and competitive environment.

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