Is more content always better?

In digital marketing, and especially in SEO, the focus often lands on text content. Even though this topic (rightfully) comes up frequently, there are still some misconceptions about it.

You may have heard marketers throw around phrases like “content is king,” as if that means the more content the better. Is that true? The answer to that question is perhaps the most common one in search engine optimization: it depends.

What does the user need?

The problem with expressions like “the more content the better” is that it gives a skewed picture of what is good or not from a user experience perspective.

A simplified example of this would be asking your friend what time it is. Do you want to simply know the time, or also hear what a clock is, when the clock was invented, and the top 3 most popular clocks of 2023? No. You want to know the time. You adapt the answer depending on the type of question being asked. The same principle applies in search results.

You can actually try searching for “What time is it” and see what ranks highest. Is it a wall of content, or is it something that gives the user a clear and direct answer?

“SEO texts” – how long should they be?

A phrase you often hear when talking about content is “SEO texts.” Not too rarely, the question also comes up about how long an “SEO text” should be. The truth is that there is no direct answer, and there is no magical word count that will push your page to the top of the search results. The important thing is to match the search intent and give the user what they need. It’s therefore more about answering the visitor’s questions as well as possible than about creating a long text.

You also shouldn’t write for a search engine first. Of course, it’s good to help a search engine along by including relevant keywords, but the content should be written with the user in mind.

So how do you know if you have enough content?

Even though it’s not about a certain number of words, some questions may require longer answers than others. How do you know what the right approach is? A tip here is the classic method of checking what your competitors are doing. Search for your primary keyword and look at the top results. Are longer, informative answers a common denominator among the top results? Then it may be that Google considers that to be what is required to satisfy the user.

Enough content is not enough

Now to the point of the whole article. A specific amount of text is not what will determine how your page performs. If you look at the top results for a query that actually requires a longer answer, you will likely see that the texts contain unique and helpful information. They can probably justify their reasoning, and in some cases, they may present data in the form of statistics. If you look at results for a query where a quick, short answer is sufficient, you will likely be served just that directly.

What both of these have in common, however, is that they match search intent and stay on topic. We have a post that goes more in depth on this very subject — feel free to read it if you want some tips on how to think about it.

If you focus on identifying what the user actually needs instead of reaching a certain word count, you’ll most likely start to see better results.