How much content do I need to rank in Google?

Writing website content is a daunting task for many users, but it’s undoubtedly one of the most important things you can do to improve your search engine rankings. In addition to giving Google enough information to correctly categorise your site, you need to communicate clearly with your visitors so they can make an informed decision on your product.

What’s the minimum amount of content I can get away with?

There are no hard and fast rules here, but guidelines suggested by SEO experts are that a homepage should have 500+ words and other pages should have 300+ words. In most cases, adding more words will give you a better result – but remember you are not just adding content for the sake of it. All text content should be concise, informative and answer any questions a potential customer might have about your business/product.

Pages with more content are generally proven to perform better in search engines, but remember at the same time that people don’t want to read a novel. This is where formatting comes in. You should break your text up into smaller, easy-to-read chunks, with descriptive headings so that users can see at a glance whether the information in this paragraph is important to them.

Formatting longer text blocks

If you have a lot of information one topic that you think might be of interest to some users but not all, you can use tricks such as adding a Javascript-powered “read more” button. to these sections. These type of buttons limit the size of a paragraph to a certain height, until the user clicks “read more” at which point the entire section is revealed. This can have multiple benefits as it keeps your page looking clean and concise to human users, and doesn’t bog them down with unnecessary info, but search engines will ignore the button and read the entirety of the text anyway.

This kind of functionality can be added using a liteweight javascript extension, such as https://jedfoster.com/Readmore.js/

How should I use keywords in my content?

Even though your content will be crawled by a computer algorithm to extract information, you should write all content so that it makes sense to a human, and avoid keyword-stuffing. When you do drop in a keyword, it needs to fit within the context of the surrounding text.

As a general rule, if you wanted to rank for a particular keyword, lets say for arguments sake you sell “bedazzled mousepads” – you want at least three things:

  • A section heading on your homepage with the keyword “bedazzled mousepads” in it.
  • A paragraph beneath this heading that also featured the keyword in context.
  • A separate page on your website specifically dedicated to the keyword, eg www.example.com/bedazzled-mousepads – this page will also have the keyword in its title and featured at least once in its 300 word description.

If you follow this format then search engines will have a pretty good idea that you are in the “bedazzled mouspads” game.

Just the beginning…

It would be nice if that was all there was to getting a good organic search engine ranking, but this is just one of many (many many) factors Google and other search engines use – however it’s definitely one of the most important and easiest to remedy. In time I will add more SEO advice. If you have any questions, please get in touch.

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