Content creation is a beast and can be a minefield, especially in this AI-driven era, where many seek to “save time” by using AI to partially or fully write content, sometimes with little to no human oversight
As guardians of the corpus of the web (it’s scary, but true in many ways), SEO professionals should seriously consider whether the content they’re publishing is valuable, useful, unique and actually answers the user’s question.
That doesn’t always attribute to a specific word count: it should be long enough to answer your customer’s question.
I am an advocate for doing everything we can to reduce the amount of AI-generated cruft on the web.
This article explores:
Content length and (potential) misconceptions around it.
Content depth and what that means.
How AI Overviews and LLMs might understand content using specific systems of analysis.
How long should my content be?
Your content should be as long as needed to answer the question related to the concept, either implicit or explicit, whether that’s 200 words or 2,000.
We’ve seen this in the API leak, where it seems that “thin content” is not specifically scored on length but on originality.
That said, in a world of semantic search, we should not necessarily ask, “How long should my content be?” but “How direct is my answer?”
If the content you (or your team) create is complicated or full of fluff just to pad the word count, make it more direct.
The fewer “hops” there are, the easier it is for Google to do two things:
Understand the relationships between what you’re saying.
Understand the explicit focus of what you’re trying to communicate.
This might mean changing the purpose or placement of your content.
For example, the blog post you’re planning to write might work better as an individual FAQ on a product or category page or as bullet points with product details or another type of formatted list.
Not everything has to be (or should be) a blog article. Let’s dive into an example of what I mean.
The image above is a statement a marketing team might create to impress folks with big words about my SEO consulting business, FLOQ.
But it doesn’t actually explicitly share the services I offer. This is reflected in what Google (reported via the Natural Language API) sees as the primary entities in that sentence:
Let’s make that shorter and more direct. (Excuse the repetition of “business” – this is off the cuff, and I’m seriously jet-lagged. It’s not FLOQ’s tagline!)
We can see this clarity reflected in the entity analysis:
These two sentences aren’t too different in absolute character count or word length.
Still, we can see a vast difference in how Google Search and likely other large language models and AI platforms or functions interpret them.
Does longer content always mean better content?
Longer content doesn’t necessarily mean higher rankings (which, as an SEO professional, can arbitrarily be called “better”).
Backlinko’s 2024 study on first-page rankings found that while longer content tends to attract more backlinks, the average length of pages on Google’s first page was about 1,500 words.
If you look closely at the graph below you can see the mean for the first result actually seems to be slightly less than other pages.