Why Does Word Count Even Matter?

If you’ve ever formally written articles, blogs, sales copy, or SEO in your life, you’ve likely been beholden to word counts for your work. This is pretty much the industry standard no matter what niche you might find yourself in.

A good word counter website can help you get to the desired word count easier, by why? Why are we subjected to a set word count? We’ll go over some of the major reasons in this piece. Read along to find out exactly why word count is so important.

Word Count Matters for the Desired Audience

Among the biggest reasons for word counts is to cater the article or piece to the target audience. Depending on your target audience, you’ll want different word counts for different readers. A reader of a novel is much different than the reader of a short blog about tank tops.

This might seem obvious, but it’s one of the biggest reasons for word counts in writing. When reading blogs and sales or marketing copy, the audience generally doesn’t have a long attention span, so it is important to keep the piece short and sweet to get the desired message across. Often 1000 words or less is sufficient when doing this style of piece.

In a magazine article, readers are a little more tolerable of a higher word count, so the word count can be a bit longer– 1000 to 3000 words. The audience is often interested in the subject matter of magazine articles and seek out the ones they are looking to read.

The word count is really important to keep the reader engaged and getting the intended message across to the reader.

Engages the Reader, Without Scaring them Away

A bulk of writers these days are writing short form blogs and digital sales and marketing copy these days as we’ve touched on earlier. So, for the sake of keeping it simple, we’ll focus mainly on this type of word count.

Word counts for blogs are typically between 500 and 1000 words. This is by design to keep people from skipping out on the piece because it was too long and burdensome to read.

It has been shown that this word count range shows the greatest level of readership amongst those who click on and read blogs and online content, so it is extremely important to keep your word count in this range for best results.

In addition to keeping your blog or article between 500-1000 words, you should also break it up into smaller paragraphs. This makes the piece easier to read for the audience and less intimidating when first clicking on the link.

It Can Help Your Search Engine Ranking

People have to find your piece in order to read it, that’s one thing that is fact. One of the best ways to get eyes on your article is to beef it up with SEO, or search engine optimization.

SEO inserts highly searched for word and phrases into the text in order to push your piece to the top of the list when some decides to look something up on a search engine, which is something that most people do daily.

In addition to adding good SEO to your article, a lengthier article or blog can end up ranking higher on a search engine then that of a shorter piece.

This is because some search engines can move up articles that they deem more in-depth. This doesn’t necessarily mean the readers will read a longer piece though.

As we have previously talked about, the kinds of readers that read blogs are often looking up a quick review of an item, a tidbit of information on something their interested in, or even just trying to find a list of products they can choose from.

This means a more in-depth article might be skipped by a potential reader. This is why keeping it between 500 and 1000 words is really important.

Other Considerations

While word count that is kept low when published on the web can be more readable and attractive for people, that is not always the case.

Some digital marking experts believe that pieces that contain more than 1000 words generate more shares on social media. This is another key to generating traffic, so keep this in mind as well.

Additionally, it’s important to make sure the content is compelling, not word fillers trying to hit a word count. Quality is always better than quality when it comes to a successful piece.

Conclusion

We hope this has shed a little more light into why word counts are so important when writing anything that is published.

Keeping a close eye on your audience and the content of your article or blog will help you dial in exactly where that word count needs to be.