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In recent years content length has been fiercely debated, with many SEO gurus telling their followers that they must create extremely long posts if they want to succeed. While there is certainly good evidence that content length correlates to rankings, it’s not the most important factor.

The reason for this is because the content length is often inversely correlated to content quality. When you’re prioritizing length, you will naturally reduce the value of each word, saying something in 1,000 words instead of 300 because you want to rank higher.

Doing this might increase your rankings in the short term, but it’s completely adverse to what Google wants, and eventually, the algorithm will adjust to compensate. After all, they want to serve value to searchers, not the pages which have the most words. In many cases, people are looking for concise and valuable content rather than long explanations.

Therefore, while word count is obviously correlated to high rankings, there are at least five other factors that are much more important that you should also consider.

1. Providing Value to Your Readers

Firstly, the goal of your content more than anything else should be to provide value to your readers. If you can’t achieve this simple goal, then it’s unlikely that people will share or link to your page and that is going to make it more difficult for you to rank for competitive search terms.

Even if you do manage to get people onto your page, they are unlikely to convert into paying customers if your content isn’t valuable. In fact, if your page is full of fluff because you’re trying to reach an arbitrary word count it’s likely that they will leave your site with a bad taste in their mouth, never wanting to return.

If you want to provide value to your readers so that they can become paying customers, you must prioritize quality over quantity. Not doing so is a quick way to ruin your brand’s reputation and leave readers thinkings that your brand doesn’t care about quality.

Why Are They Reading Your Content?

To provide value to your readers, you must first understand why it is that they would read the article that you’re creating. Without understanding the problem that the reader is trying to solve it’s difficult for you to provide value correctly.

Value comes in many different forms; a reader might be looking for advice, entertainment, instructions, humor or another of the many different forms of value. Recognizing what your readers come to you for is vital to crafting your content in a way that provides that value.

For example; if you are creating a post about how to install a drain pipe it’s likely that the reader will be searching for detailed instructions. The searcher probably has little to no experience, and therefore your instructions must be detailed and very fine, not skipping over details that more experienced people would find intuitive.

Understanding the ‘searchers intent’ is vital to providing value. Now that you know what they are looking for you must create a page that transfers that value in the best way, in many cases this will not be by writing a huge article that is longer than the competitors.

2. Offering More Than Just Words

In this day and age, it’s not good enough to force your users to read your content; you must offer alternative forms of content like graphics, videos, and an audio experience. The reason for this is because reading often isn’t the best way for you to present your content, especially if you’re trying to explain something visual or complicated.

Let’s look at an example; you could be creating a guide which explains to your customers how they can repair their lawn mower. Of course, it would be possible to explain this just using words, but this is far less valuable to your customers than images or videos.

For this reason, most instruction manuals now come with images in them, and many companies have detailed videos on their website or YouTube channels. Both of these options are far superior to words, and this is why content length is arguably not very important.

Your page might only have a hundred words on, but it might be accompanied by multiple images and an incredible video that provides immense value to your readers.

As well as this, studies have shown that pages with images on them tend to rank better. Plus, people are more likely to link to websites that have detailed videos and graphics on them instead of plain text. The reason for this is because words are inferior in many cases to videos and they are less immersive and impressive.

Obviously, the cost of creating a high-quality video is usually higher than the cost of writing an article, this can be prohibitive to some websites, but it’s also a great opportunity. With many of your competitors failing to take advantage of video content the benefit for you is far superior.

Plus, by creating video content, you can upload it to other platforms like Vimeo and YouTube. Doing this gives you access to another marketing channel whereby you can find more customers and increase your revenue. Content length isn’t everything, and it’s certainly not more important than adding visual elements that enhance your page.

3. Correct Grammar and Spelling

While you could make a good argument that proper grammar is encompassed by ‘valuable content,’ it’s so vital that it deserves its section. If your grammar is poor, then both Google and your visitors are going to notice.

Some research suggests that Google’s algorithm can distinguish between content that is well written and pages that have poor grammar. If they don’t already then, it’s incredibly likely that they will use good grammar as a ranking factor in the future. The reason for this is simple; users want to read content that is well written and that’s the reason you can’t skip proofreading of your content.

As a user, if you arrive on a page with poor grammar and spelling you are likely to click back and try to find another page to visit. Users do this because it’s extraordinarily difficult to read a page that is poorly written.

These users who click back are obviously not going to become your customers, but even those that do stay on your page are far less likely to convert. After all, if you have spelling mistakes and grammar mistakes in your content, then your readers are going to associate your brand with low quality and poor standards.

In fact, Globo Lingo’s researchers found that 59 percent of its participants would be less likely to use a service or product if there were obvious grammatical or spelling mistakes on its website or marketing materials.

With this association in their minds, it’s far less likely that they will convert into paying customers, no matter how good your sales pages are or how helpful your products can be.

Check out these 30 common grammatical errors we all need to stop making. And take a look at these free grammar checker tools if you need some help.

4. Keyword Optimization

If you’re going to the effort of creating a fantastic piece of content for your readers to enjoy it’s smart to ensure that it’s optimized properly for valuable keywords. Doing this will make it far more lik