In a suggestion made in this Marketing Sharepa blog post titled Content Marketing: Focus on value, not length, the author says that it doesn’t matter how long your content is as long as it delivers value.
I believe this focus on content length is archaic…a vestigial reminder of media buys…essentially, the appendix of digital marketing…
And yet, people writing for your blogs and creating your content marketing may not be content experts. They may not be professional writers. Many are likely subject matter experts asked to pitch in and creating content is not a process they are comfortable with, so they want some guidance.
Now, I’m not saying quantity or length doesn’t matter; I mean it really doesn’t make sense to write just a simple sentence as a complete blog post even if that single sentence conveys the entire essence of your message. Nonetheless, you don’t need to go on and on just to create 400 or 500 words. A few years ago Matt Cutts of Google advised that your blog post or webpage content must be around 400 words in order to make it search engine friendly and my personal experience has echoed this estimate. But what if your webpage requires just a single paragraph?
For a person providing content writing services and charging by pages and words this might pose a problem but only when you are working with clients who are not farsighted. When you’re creating content and when you’re concerned about your search engine rankings it is not a matter of individual pages, it is a matter of collective content on your website and blog. Although while quoting I always say (300-500 words) but once the initial communication is over I make it clear to the client that it isn’t necessary that I’m going to stick with this upper and lower limit. I might write 200-250 words for a document if that’s what it needs. Having said that, I also convey that I don’t bother if sometimes the number of words go beyond 500 words, say 600 words or even 700 words. I flow with the requirement and don’t constrain myself with exactly how many words must be written.
As rightly pointed out by the author in the above-mentioned blog post, ultimately it is the value of your content that matters, not its length. Interestingly, if your content delivers real value it automatically gets good search engine rankings irrespective of how long or short your individual pages are.