The short answer: long enough to answer the question completely, and not one paragraph longer. The useful answer takes a little more explaining, because “write 2,000 words” is still one of the most common briefs in the industry and it is usually wrong.
Where the 2,000-word rule came from
A series of studies found that pages ranking on the first page tended to be longer than pages ranking below it. That finding is real. The conclusion drawn from it — that making a page longer will move it up — does not follow.
Thorough pages tend to rank well, and thorough pages tend to be longer. Length is a symptom of covering a subject properly, not the cause of ranking. Padding a 600-word answer out to 2,000 words gives you a worse page with the same information in it.
It is worth naming the confusion directly, because it repeats everywhere in SEO advice. Two things being found together does not tell you which one produced the other, or whether some third thing produced both. Serious topics attract serious coverage, serious coverage attracts links, and links move rankings. The word count came along for the ride.
Let the query decide
Different questions need genuinely different amounts of writing.
- A direct factual question — “what is a 301 redirect” — needs a clear answer, an example, and the common mistake. Three hundred words can be complete. Padding it actively hurts, because the answer gets buried.
- A comparison — “X vs Y” — needs both options described fairly, the trade-offs, and a recommendation. Usually 800 to 1,200 words, and often better as a table than prose.
- A how-to with real steps needs every step, in order, with the failure modes. Length is whatever the process takes. Cutting a step to hit a word count is the only real mistake available here.
- A genuine guide to a broad subject can justify several thousand words, but only if someone would read it start to finish or use it as a reference. If not, it should have been five separate pages.
How we set a target in practice
We read the pages currently ranking — not to match their length, but to find what they all cover and what none of them covers. The gap is the brief. Length falls out of that.
When we do give a writer a number it is a range with a reason attached: “900 to 1,200, because you need to cover these five sub-questions and one of them needs an example.” A number without a reason produces padding every time.
One more habit worth stealing: count the questions, not the words. If a brief lists six things the page must answer and the draft answers four of them at length, the piece is not long enough regardless of how many words it contains.
The signs a page is too long
- A “what is” section explaining a term the target reader already knows.
- An introduction that spends three paragraphs before reaching the subject.
- A conclusion that restates the article without adding anything.
- Sections that exist because a competitor had them, not because they answer anything.
- An FAQ block at the bottom repeating answers the article already gave, added because a plugin suggested it.
All five are the same failure: writing to fill a quota rather than to answer a question. They are also the five easiest things to cut when you are updating old content, which is usually where we start on an existing site.
Cutting is underrated
Almost every content refresh we run removes more than it adds, and the pages usually improve.
Part of that is the reader: an answer reached in fifteen seconds satisfies somebody who would have left at forty. Part of it is focus. A page that spends nine hundred words on its actual subject sends a clearer signal about what it is for than the same nine hundred words diluted across two thousand.
If you are looking for somewhere to start on an existing blog, take your ten highest-traffic posts and delete every section you cannot defend. It costs nothing, it takes an afternoon, and it is the closest thing to a free win in content SEO.
One page or several?
If a subject has several distinct questions inside it, each with its own search demand, they generally deserve their own pages linked together. One enormous page competing with itself for four different queries usually ranks worse than four focused pages that link to each other.
The test is whether someone searching for one part would be happy landing on the whole. If they would have to scroll past three unrelated sections to reach their answer, split it.
The reverse case exists too, and is less obvious. Four thin posts on nearly the same question compete with each other and none of them wins. Merging them into one good page and redirecting the rest is frequently the single most effective content change available on an older site.
Whichever direction you are going, the writing itself still has to hold up — writing for search engines without sounding like it covers that side.
We plan content this way for every account — see our content writing service, or ask us for a look at where your existing pages overlap.