Welcome back this is John Locke for Lockdown SEO, and today I want to talk about word count.
How much does it really matter when it comes to SEO? Now there are two schools of thoughts
when it comes to this. Let's talk about it now, the first school of thought is, the so-called
skyscraper technique that was coined by Brian Dean of Backlinko, where the idea is that you
find the top ranking pieces of content, you look at the word count and what they're covering,
and then you try and go a few steps deeper in covering that content, and making increasingly
bigger and bigger pieces of content to rank. Now that can have some merit sometimes. But I think
that this idea is often misinterpreted, where the word count or the size of an article, it gets
too cumbersome for normal people to really sift through and read and find that the answers that
they're looking for. And that is what a lot of people say, is, it doesn't need to be
longer. It just needs to be the right size. Sometimes shorter is better. And this I do agree
with. A lot of times when people are just looking for a simple answer to a question they don't need
a 10,000 word essay on the fact. They just want to find the information that they're looking for
and I agree with this to a certain degree. But I'm going to tell you how I look at word count
and it goes a little something like this. You want to look at the average size of the word count
of what is ranking near the top. So if you're looking at the top 10 to 15 pieces of content
that are ranking for a specific keyword, you can get an idea of how long your article needs to
be in order to rank. And you don't want to go too short, but what you do is you open up those tabs,
I usually open it up in a tool like KWfinder instead of opening it up directly in the SERPs,
the search engine results pages. But I just simply select all copy and then paste that into an online
word count tool. So if you just search "word count tool" you should be able to find several where you
just paste that in, and you get a range of how long an article should be. So let's say that you
have a certain keyword that you're trying to rank for and the smallest article is 563 words
and maybe the longest is 2500 words, but the majority of the articles out there are between
1500 and 1800 words. Then that is going to be your sweet spot of where your article needs to come in.
Now I think that there's a thing that's even more important than that, and that's looking
at the topics that are covered within an article or a piece of content, that is making it rank,
and what questions it's really answering. So another thing that I look at is what is
the structure of this piece of content, and what sections are there, what questions is it answering
in each section, and that's a very important thing to look at when it comes to content. Bcause Google
uses machine learning to deal with these problems at scale. When it sees certain keywords doing well
with a certain type of content, and answering certain things, then it starts looking for those
phrases, it starts looking for those topics, it starts looking for synonymous words that
are associated with those things, and answering those questions for the human users is going to
produce some positive signals when it comes to search. So if people go to a page and they find
all the answers that they're looking for, then that's going to do better. So pay attention to how
you're structuring your content, as well as the word count. You can't just write about anything
at all, it has to be specific things that are included in there. One more piece of advice that
I would give you. When it comes to this, creating a piece of content that is likely to rank when
you're answering certain questions. Early in the content, you want to phrase your sentences
in a way to where if there's a a simple question, like, "What is SEO?"" --put just
a one or two sentence answer after that, and those snippets might be taken by Google. And if you are
fortunate enough to rank on page one for your keyword, it can take those snippets and then just
take them and put them at the top of the search results. And sometimes that'll happen and you
might get some extra traffic from that, from it being placed at the top as the snippet. So this
is always really good when it comes to visibility in search, and it just shows that Google trusts
your site, and it trusts your content. The more those that you can get, the better it's going
to be for you overall. I hope this gives you a few more ideas when it comes to creating content
that's going to rank very well in Google. My name is John Locke. My business is Lockedown SEO,
and if you have a question, leave it in the comments below. I would be happy to answer
for you. If you liked this, give it a thumbs up, because that helps YouTube surface this videos in
its algorithm, and more people can find it. That's all I have for now. Until next time, peace.