How many words to write for a web page?

‘How many words should I write for a website?’

We get asked the ‘How many words on a web page’ question quite a lot.

So, firstly just for those who simply won’t settle until we get to the part of the article that reveals the magic number and will scream when they find out the real answer, let’s get this over and done with right now and tear this plaster off quickly…

There isn’t a magical number. As you were.

Now that’s done let’s look at this properly, there are a bunch of ingredients - which when combined - will provide you with your best chance for a high-ranking position without you having to pay for advertising.

In the first instance let’s take a brief look at what you are writing. The content needs to be relevant to your service or product and it needs to be descriptive.

Example: Let’s imagine that you sell gym equipment and one of the product sections is about barbell bars.

For the overview you could state:

‘We have a range of barbell bars to choose from, from small straight bars to full-sized bars’.

Or instead, you could state:

‘Olympic Weight Bars for your gym or home gym, perfect for dead lifts, bench presses and squats.

We stock the full range of bar sizes from a 4ft straight barbell bar through to full-sized 7ft barbell bars which will fit squat racks and power racks.

Each barbell bar is made of solid steel with a chrome finish and tested to 300kg.

All of the barbell bars in our range are suitable for 2” Olympic sized weight plates. The grip area of each bar is 28mm in diameter and are knurled, which means you will get a good secure grip on the bar.

All barbell bars are available for UK home delivery and come with a 30-day Return Policy.’

Ok next, the keywords. Whilst you should not just cram in loads of phrases so that your page resembles more of a thesaurus than an informative page, you must include what your potential customers will be looking for.

You may also need to think broader than you already have, and this is when a fresh pair of eyes can really help shed a different viewpoint on matters. We recently did a post briefly covering this entitled ‘Fixing Three Common Issues on Websites’ so be sure to go check that out for some more details on what we mean on this.

Lastly, let’s look at the number, the word count, how many?

You should start by researching your competitors and see how much they are writing. If they are writing 2000-word descriptive and keyword-rich pages about a subject, and you’re only writing 20 words, you can guess who will most likely receive the most traffic and conversions.

Now, that’s not to say you should place too much literal reliance on this and we certainly are NOT saying if your competitor is writing 20 words, you should only need to write 30.

Example: We very recently began working with a company that provides cleaning services. Following our initial audits, we identified some clear competitors of theirs, one consistently ranked high for most of the search terms for the types of services both our client and their competitor provide.

We could see that our client had 9,000 words across their current 15-page website, an average of 600 words per page.

The competitor who ranked high (very often at position one on page one) has 600,000 words across their 418-page website, an average of 1,435 words per page and their copy is descriptive and clear.

To summarise…

Search engines are looking for expertise in the subject matter.

Quality content helps people. Search engines like helping people, that’s how they make money, so if the content on a page or website is helping people, the search engine is going to send more people to that content, so it helps those folks out too.

Mould your website into a knowledgeable source with great advice and content and you will be giving your website a huge boost of potential for its rankings to improve.

Just remember when you are writing about a topic, a service or product - that you want customers to buy from you - you cannot get enough across in a sentence or just a short single paragraph.

We hope this very brief insight has helped and has got you thinking. If you would like to talk about website copy and content, we’d love to hear from you.

Call us on 0121 401 1471 or drop us an email at [email protected]