Answer
How many words should a page be?
As many as the question needs and no more.
How many words should a page be?
As many as the question needs and no more. Length correlates with ranking because thorough answers tend to be longer, not because length is rewarded. A short page that completely answers a specific question outranks a long one padded to hit a target.
The longer answer
The word-count advice circulating in the industry comes from correlation studies, which show that pages ranking well tend to be longer. The causation runs the other way: pages that cover a subject completely tend to be longer, and completeness is what is being rewarded.
Writing to a target produces padding, and padding is visible. It also dilutes the part of the page that actually answers the question, which hurts both the reader and the chance of being quoted in an answer surface. If this is already in place, Ecommerce SEO for B2B services and Entity and Semantic SEO for B2B services are the next two things to fix.
Where length does matter is as a diagnostic. A commercial page of two hundred words probably has not covered what a buyer needs to decide, and a set of generated pages all at four hundred words probably shares most of its text with its siblings. Answer Engine Optimization in Chicago is written for the practitioner, App Store Optimization in Chicago for whoever is paying.
What to do about it
- Write to the question, not to a target
- Use word count as a diagnostic for thinness, not as a goal
- Check what the pages currently ranking actually cover, rather than how long they are
- For generated page sets, measure overlap between siblings alongside length
Where this changes by service
The answer is not uniform across the work:
- Lifecycle and Email, which cannot be done properly without it
- Analytics and Measurement, where getting it wrong shows up in deleting the metrics that have never changed a decision
- Brand and Creative: it is the reason writing for the person who has to defend the choice internally is scoped the way it is
- Generative Engine Optimization, where it is the difference between restructuring the pages so a model can lift a correct answer out of them working and appearing to
Where this changes by sector
Nor is it uniform across sectors:
- For Manufacturing and industrial, where low volume, high value, and a specification sheet that decides the deal. it moves up the list
- Education and training: ignoring it costs more here, because admission cycles, a parent paying for a student’s decision, and course-level demand.
- For a Real estate and property business the stakes are higher, because portals own the generic demand, so the win is locality authority and the specific listing.
What this does not cover
Thin and short are not the same thing. A definitive two-hundred-word answer is not thin; an eight-hundred-word page that repeats itself is. Next: Content operations automation. After that, CRM integration, which is where the trade-offs live.
If this answer does not fit your situation, the reason is usually one of the two lists above rather than the answer being wrong. The adjacent reading is London, and Los Angeles for the version of this question that comes up later.
What to check on your own site
Four questions that establish whether this applies to you:
- Whether it holds on a mid-range phone and not only on the machine it was built on
- Whether it survives a logged-out visit from a cold cache
- Whether the exception somebody added two years ago is still needed
- Whether it was verified in the logs or inferred from a dashboard
Still not answered?
Send the version of this question that applies to your own site. If the answer is that you do not need us, that is the answer you get.
Start with an honest read on the gaps
Most accounts have one thing holding them back. The useful first conversation is about finding which one.