How much copy do you need to put on a single page of your website to make it really irresistible to Google’s ranking algorithm? 200 words? 500?
Actually, data shows the best ranking pages have between 1,400 and 2,000 words on them! This is especially useful to know if you have a very specific product or service as part of your offering that you’d love to get way up in the rankings, because even the biggest and slickest brands neglect to optimise their category pages. Bump up your word count (with quality content, of course) and you could find your page outranking those of the biggest names in your industry.
Organic Schmorganic
The other thing you should always consider is buying your way to the top of the results page. Why? Two good reasons:
- Brands that are not on the first search page might as well not exist. In fact, the top-ranking result grabs 36% of all clicks. The majority of them go to the first three listings. That leaves just a sliver of the audience for the other bajillion businesses to fight over.
- Users cannot tell the difference between paid and organic listing. When they see a business at the top of the page, they assume that business is the market leader, no matter how they got there.
Other things
- Backlinking is so 2017, right? Nope. Linking to external sources is still rewarded by Google. Link out if you want to move up.
- Google cares about images. Make yours interesting if you want them popping up in the Google image search.
- FAQs are a good way to boost SEO
- The rest of the world tends to follow what happens in the US, and in the US Google is starting to favour educational content over e-commerce. That means when you go searching for a clock, the content about which clock to choose, how clocks work or where clocks are made will rank better than the content that says ‘buy here’ – educate before you sell.
An interesting snippet
Knowing exactly how people search is key to building good content. Men use about 50 different search terms when they are looking for a suit.
Women use more than 1,600 different terms when they’re looking for a dress…
I know, I know, you’re not selling either of those things – but it’s a good reminder to spend proper time understanding how your customers search.
Want to know more?
Get in touch and I’ll tell you what else I heard and what else we know. [email protected]
Kendi Burness Cowan