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The Role of Content Length in SEO
15 Plays7 months ago
In this episode, Andrew Laws dives into the often debated topic of optimal content length for SEO. He explores the myth that longer content automatically equates to better SEO, provides insights into the evolution of content evaluation by search engines like Google, and offers practical tips for crafting articles that genuinely serve the reader's interests and search intent.
**What You'll Learn:**
- **The Myth of Long Content:** Understand why the idea that "longer is better" became popular and why it's not necessarily true today.
- **SEO's Historical Context:** How Google's early limitations influenced content length strategies.
- **Practical Content Creation Tips:** Strategies for writing articles that are the ideal length for your topics without padding them unnecessarily.
- **The Importance of Quality:** Why writing for humans, not just algorithms, will actually benefit your SEO in the long run.
**Episode Highlights:**
1. **Breaking Down the Myth** (00:00:24)
- Discussion on how content length affects SEO and the origins of the myth surrounding long articles.
2. **SEO and Content Length Over Time** (00:01:13)
- How Google has evolved in assessing content quality and the diminishing importance of article length.
3. **Current Best Practices for Content Length** (00:07:09)
- Advice on determining the right length for your content based on topic complexity and competition.
4. **Writing with Authority and Passion** (00:08:22)
- The significance of expertise and genuine interest in your subject matter when creating content.
5. **Tools and Tips for Optimizing Content** (00:09:43)
- Using tools like SEMrush to analyze competitor content and adjust your strategies accordingly.
**Call to Action:**
- **Feedback:** Share your thoughts and experiences on how content length has impacted your SEO efforts.
- **Engagement:** Like, subscribe, and comment to join the conversation and help others find this podcast.
**Closing:** (00:11:34)
Andrew wraps up with a reminder that in SEO, the best answer to many questions is often "it depends," highlighting the tailored approach necessary for effective SEO
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Transcript
Introduction: The Long vs. Short Article Debate
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, my name's Andrew Laws and welcome back to the Untitled SEO Podcast by Yesseo. Today we're going to talk about content length. Should you write really long articles or should you write very brief articles? I think you probably know before I go any further, the answer is somewhere in the middle of
Does Article Length Affect Ranking?
00:00:19
Speaker
that. But how do you figure out what that is? First of all, we're going to have a look at why content length impacts how well your articles rank.
00:00:30
Speaker
It's all about your mates. It's all about what they're doing. And I'm going to explain that fully in a moment. The purpose of this video is just to look at how this myth that all articles have to be really long came about. And then I'm going to give you some practical ways to ignore all that stuff and just write the perfect length articles without losing your bananas. So first of all, how did this obsession with really long articles come about?
00:01:00
Speaker
In the early days of SEO, in fact, until fairly recently, Google wasn't very good at judging authority. You might think that the Google algorithm is thinking, hey, lots of words, they must know what they're talking about. And to a certain extent, that may well be what was going on.
The Rise of Irrelevant Long Content
00:01:17
Speaker
But the reality is that people also seem strangely impressed with very, very long articles.
00:01:23
Speaker
You land on a page and you think, wow, these guys have really made an effort. Now, of course, this led to a really crappy situation where you'd be searching the Internet for an answer to something. Let's say a recipe. A recipe is a nice example to use. How do I boil potatoes?
00:01:41
Speaker
and you'd land on the page that ranked number one in Google search results and the article would start something like, well, I remember as a child potatoes were often worn around the belt on a piece of string which was the fashion at the
Google's Shift to Quality over Length
00:01:56
Speaker
time. As a child I lived in northwest
00:02:00
Speaker
Virginia go on and on and on and then you eventually get the recipe right at the end. It's almost become like a meme in internet circles. Just how much waffle there is. And that waffles just put there for Google. It's not put there to actually add any value to the page. So the world had to move on. Google had to get a better grip on understanding what authoritative and useful content was.
00:02:26
Speaker
One of the first things that happened is Google started paying more attention to rich snippets, schema code, little bits of information that we put in blog pages and posts that just serves up the answers to questions and other bits of information directly to Google.
How to Outrank Competitors
00:02:41
Speaker
So suddenly those people writing those long, hey, yeah, a potato can come in five colors. And those really, really long articles were the long introduction of the payoff at the end. They were starting to find their payoff was actually being lifted off their page and
00:02:56
Speaker
just put right in the search results. Search for how to cook a spud and just the information would just be there. So that was all very self-defeating. All the effort that these people were going to to write really, really long articles just was for nothing. No good at all. It wasn't actually delivering every single person to their website. Google was just taking the information. Now this still happens a lot and you still see these very, very long articles.
00:03:26
Speaker
But why is that? Basically because the web, for all the talk we have around it being so fast and developing quickly and whatever, is actually glacially slow. If you're finding an article that's still ranking well, that's still written in that very long, waffly format, it's because Google hasn't found anything better.
00:03:48
Speaker
There's a theory that doesn't get talked about much in SEO. And the theory, the truth probably, is that you only have to be marginally better than your competitors. Look, here's how it goes. There's lots of software and lots of information and lots of articles and lots of tools and lots of things that will cost you money. My goodness, my glasses are filthy. Lots of things that will cost you money that tell you to do SEO a certain way.
00:04:17
Speaker
Now, a lot of those tools, bits of software and articles, tell you that SEO, to be done a certain way, has to be x, x, x, x, x, like these long checklists, oh my goodness, long checklists of tasks that you must complete. The reality is, if your competitors aren't doing SEO, or if your competitors have terrible websites, you don't have to do as much as all that. You only have to be marginally better.
00:04:44
Speaker
I don't know why this isn't discussed more often.
Google's Focus on Helpful Content
00:04:47
Speaker
Right, my glasses are clean, I can continue. Just before we leave this theory of just being marginally better, I say that with the caveat that if you are only marginally better to your competitors and that's why you're ranking, they will catch up with you. Nobody ever sits at the top of Google forever with zero maintenance. So try and be a bit better than just a little bit better.
00:05:15
Speaker
So why do we still see long articles that are brand new? Well, partly because it could be a complex subject that it really does take that much, that many words and that length of article to rank. Remember, Google only wants to send people to your website and to your pages if you are providing the best resource on the entire internet for the search terms that you're targeting.
00:05:45
Speaker
The best. That's it. The best, the most authoritative. That doesn't mean it has to be the longest, but in some incredibly competitive niches where there could be hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands of websites all trying to rank right at the top, that's where this battle to write longer and longer articles can become a bit of an arms race. Things are changing though and
00:06:12
Speaker
what I think is particularly interesting about the recent helpful content update which Google's
The Role of AI and Natural Writing
00:06:20
Speaker
rolling out. So I'm putting a face here if you're watching on video because people get too excited about algorithm updates but I quite like this one because it's Google apparently getting a little bit closer to understanding what content is genuinely helpful.
00:06:37
Speaker
versus what content is written to rank. Now obviously we all want to write to rank, we want our content to rank, but if you write only for the algorithm and not for humans,
00:06:47
Speaker
then ultimately it's not going to be useful for humans. So Google doesn't want to rank that stuff at the top anymore. And if you think about usability, articles that are only written for the algorithm aren't going to get the conversions that you want on your website anyway. Because people are going to land there and go, why have I got to read 3,000 words about the history of potatoes? I just want to learn how to boil my spot. I will stop talking about potatoes soon. So how do you figure out
00:07:16
Speaker
what length of article you should write in order to rank for the keywords you're targeting. The quick answer is just write naturally. Just write the best content you can. Cover all the angles. This is where AI can be really, really useful actually. Write yourself an article, a sketch. My first paragraph will be about this. My next paragraph will be about this. My next paragraph will be about this.
00:07:42
Speaker
and then drop it into an AI tool like chatgpt4, or a good AI tool, and say, look, I want to cover this entire subject.
Importance of Skilled Copywriting
00:07:52
Speaker
What am I missing?
00:07:54
Speaker
And this AI is very good at kind of skimming through and going, well, you're talking about, I'm going to stick with potatoes for now, you're talking about potatoes, but you haven't actually mentioned how to cook them in an air fryer. And you go, right, I must include that for this to be a rounded article, for it to be the best article in the world ever about cooking potatoes. I need to write about that.
00:08:14
Speaker
enough about AI now so write from the heart write a good article this is where human quality is very very important and you knowing about what you're talking about writing about is incredibly important there's a brilliant
00:08:30
Speaker
author and public speaker called Dale Carnegie. And his secret to good public speaking is to speak from the heart, speak about a topic you care about and your knowledge about. Exactly the same thing goes for writing articles. This is where the skill of finding a brilliant copywriter becomes incredibly important. Hug your copywriters, love them, stay with them, nurture them, train them, teach them, listen to them.
Determining Optimal Content Length
00:08:56
Speaker
Right, enough copywriter love for now.
00:08:59
Speaker
So there's the Woffde SEO it depends type answer to how wrong your content should be. I'm gonna give you some practical advice now if you really want to try and give yourself a good shot at ranking well by picking your article length. I'm pulling faces again, I'm sorry to anyone listening on the podcast. I'm pulling faces again because you're not gonna rank just because of the length of your content. It's not gonna happen, okay?
00:09:28
Speaker
But if you want to get the lay of the land, use a tool like the SEMrush Content Analyzer. Because what that does, you put in the keywords, the group of keywords you want to rank for, the territory, so the country or county or whatever you want to rank in.
00:09:46
Speaker
and whether you're targeting mobile first or desktop, and almost everyone's targeting mobile first because that's where most traffic is, SEMROSH then goes out and it looks at what's ranking in the top 10 for those keywords for that area, for that type of search. And we'll report back on what the average length is of the articles. What sort of words are they using in there? What are semantically linked, right?
00:10:15
Speaker
BSSEO tool alert, semantically linked. Just means what words are used in the article around the primary keyword. So if you're talking about spuds, then naturally you're going to talk about weight of potatoes, cooking methods, ovens. I really should have thought this through. Don't talk about spuds again. I won't. Okay, good. That was weird. So there's your answer.
00:10:42
Speaker
Does content length have an impact on SEO? Absolutely it does. But probably not as much as you
The Essence of Writing for Humans in SEO
00:10:51
Speaker
think. Being natural and writing for humans is more important than anything else. Got that? Brilliant. Right. Off you go. Go write the correct length article to rank well.
00:11:06
Speaker
There's your SEO update for today. Please let me know if you disagree. Let me know what your experiences are. The great thing about SEO is that nobody can give you 100% truth about anything. Because remember, the SEO answer to any question is always, it depends. Hope this has been useful to you. Please like, subscribe, comment, and tell all your friends. I'm sure they would love to know. Bye-bye.