Body text is everything in your writing outside of headings—pay attention to optimizing this, especially for longer-form content such as blog posts.
- Body text should answer the questions laid out in the headings: The initial answer is best to be at the beginning of the given section, between 40-50 words (but don’t put too much pressure on word count). This first or so sentence should include the target keyword and be very well-optimized, so Google can more easily pick up on it and highlight it on the search results page. After the initial answer, the paragraphs can be expanded to add further detail and clarification to demonstrate your knowledge.
- Consider any relevant SERP features (I promise, I’ll get to discuss these soon, but we need to take care of the very basics) for the targeted keywords when writing the body text.
- Pay attention to writing in similar lengths as the competing articles.
This is the first time I’ve mentioned the competition like this, so let me give you some details. It’s not confirmed that the Google algorithm watches content length so this is not an absolute must to follow but common sense tells us that if most of the top-ranking articles in search are about 1500 words, you probably shouldn’t compete there with a 4000-word piece.
Word count is just a simple signal that you can take into consideration, and it will also help you with planning your work, knowing how long that blog post should “ideally” be.
| How to figure out the ideal word count for my content? I use a Google Chrome web browser extension to check the word count of competing articles, called “Article Word Counter” (but you can find others, too). After I google the keyword I want to check and possibly optimize my content for, I open a competing page from search, then turn on the extension and it’ll automatically show me the word count of that page. Sometimes for technical reasons, you need to highlight the text on the page, and then it’ll show you the word count, and in very rare cases, you have to copy and paste the text to a Word, Pages, or Google Docs document and check the word count there. Then, I line up the word count of the first ten ranking articles from search, and I use the AVERAGE formula in Google Docs to see the average word count that I should go for with my content. Sometimes, again, due to technical difficulties, you can’t get the number for all the top ten ranking articles — in this case, feel free to simply get the average of the ones you have, and don’t think too hard about it. As I said, word count is not the factor that is significantly going to influence your chances of ranking well in search. |