Word count doesn’t matter to Google. But being helpful does.

I am not sure how it even started, but for years, many editorial and content marketing writers were fully convinced that length was a major factor in SEO.

And the word counts that writers thought they needed to hit were incredibly high, over 1,000 words in some instances.

I’m sure you have seen examples of this over the years like those recipe stories that go on and on when all you really want is the recipe.

Well, Google has made it very clear that they don’t value story length when it comes to SEO and instead encourage writers to focus on creating helpful information and high-quality content.

I’d like to dig a little deeper on what this means and how to think about it.

1. What Google is saying today about length

John Mueller, one of Google’s top SEO experts who shares insights on the company’s search ranking algorithms and SEO practices, has now said multiple times that the search engine doesn’t evaluate content based on the number of words or links in a story.

Mueller has said Google is looking for relevant, high-quality information that is good for readers. And it absolutely doesn’t matter if the article is 250 words or 2,000 words.

“Nobody at Google counts the links or the words on your blog posts,” he has said. Here’s the LinkedIn post where he explains this. Writers should stop asking how long their article should be and just focus on making the article as relevant and useful as possible for their readers. And publishers should stop using word count as part of their assignments. Make the story as long or as short as it needs to be.

2. Help readers take an action

One of the most effective ways to create content per
Google’s Helpful Content guidelines is to really focus on the solutions and the information the reader probably came to the article seeking.

Yes, in some cases readers are opening stories because they have a general interest in the topic and want to learn more but it’s much more common that a reader is opening a story — or found it through search — because they are trying to get a job done.

They are probably trying to do one of the following things:

* Help me solve a problem I am having
* Help me plan something or go somewhere
* Help me get involved or learn more

Generally, this is what people come to Google for:
* Find something to buy
* Help me do something locally
* Provide me more knowledge

So think about your own patterns around what you search for and the stories that you open as you consider what kind of stories to write and how to promote and distribute them. Those six bullets above are a good framework to use in building your own content strategy.

3. Make it easy for readers to find information

Story formats play a hugely important role when it comes to helpful content. That means that every story should go through a process to determine the best way to display the information for the reader.

Is that a traditional narrative, a Q&A, a list, using chapters throughout, maps, numbers or some other kind of layer that illustrates the information for the reader?

When writers and editors do this they are putting the readers best interest first. And it matters so much when it comes to engagement. A great story that isn’t packaged or formatted correctly, will very likely not reach its potential audience.

One of the best ways to achieve this is by making your content actionable. A simple tactic you can use is to create sections in your story and use bullets and bolds to provide the solutions and tips that can help readers get a job done.

Here is a sponsored content story on exploring the outdoors where the writer uses “tips” in each section to help the reader have a good experience if they go.

And this one helps the reader decide what to eat at a restaurant by using a very clear header.

You can do this same approach with really any story that has a solution for a reader. This works quite well for health and education content.