The myth
Myth: longer pages rank better. Aim for 2,000 words, and pad if you have to.
Reality: word count is not a ranking factor. Google has said this plainly and repeatedly. What ranks is a page that answers the question completely. Sometimes that takes two thousand words. Often it takes three hundred.
Where the myth came from
It came from correlation studies. Someone analysed the top ten results for thousands of queries, found the average length was high, and published it. The finding was real. The conclusion drawn from it was not.
Long pages often rank well because comprehensive answers tend to be long, and because the sort of person writing a thorough page is usually doing everything else properly too. Length was a symptom of quality, not the cause of ranking.
Padding a three hundred word answer out to two thousand does not give you the qualities that made those pages rank. It gives you a three hundred word answer that takes longer to find.
Comprehensive is not the same as long. A page that fully answers a simple question in 250 words is comprehensive. A 2,000 word page circling the same answer is padded, and readers feel it immediately.
What padding actually costs you
- People leave. Someone wanting your callout charge does not want six paragraphs on the history of your trade first
- It looks like filler, because it is. Google's helpful content guidance explicitly targets pages written for search engines rather than people
- It buries the answer. The thing that converts is now below three screens of preamble
- It is slower. More words, usually more images, heavier page
- It costs you time you could have spent on a second page that targets a different search
How long should your pages actually be?
Let intent decide it. Match the depth to what the searcher needs, not to a target.
When short really is too short
The myth has an opposite that is also wrong. Thin content is a real problem, it is just not measured in words.
A page is thin when it does not answer the question, not when it is under some threshold. Signs you are genuinely too short:
- It raises obvious questions it does not answer, like price or timescale
- It is a heading and two sentences with nothing specific in them
- It could describe any business in your trade
- You wrote it to have a page rather than because someone needed it
The fix is to answer the missing questions, not to reach a number.
Write down every question a customer asks you about that service. Answer all of them. When they are answered, stop. That is the correct length, and it is different for every page.
Related myths worth binning
"You need to blog weekly"
No. Publishing frequency is not a ranking factor either. An abandoned blog with three posts from 2023 looks worse than no blog. Write when you have something worth saying.
"Keyword density should be 2 per cent"
This has not been meaningful for well over a decade. Write naturally and mention the thing you do because you are writing about it, not to hit a percentage.
"Fresh content means updating everything monthly"
Freshness matters for things that genuinely change. Your prices page benefits from being current. A guide to how a boiler works does not need touching in March because it is March.
"More pages is always better"
Ten strong pages beat fifty thin ones every time, and fifty near identical pages can actively harm you. We covered that in the location page guide.
What to do instead
- Pick one question per page and answer it properly
- Front load the answer. Do not make people scroll for the thing they came for
- Use headings so a skimmer can find their bit in seconds
- Cut anything that could appear on a competitor's site unchanged
- Stop when it is answered. Nobody has ever complained that a page was too easy to read
If a page feels short but answers everything, it is finished. If you are staring at a word counter, you are writing for the wrong reader.
More on the writing itself in how to write your own copy, and on the pages worth having at all in what a website actually needs.