Every few years a study circulates showing that pages ranking on the first page of Google average somewhere between 1,400 and 2,000 words, and every time it does, a wave of 2,000-word articles appears that should have been 600. The correlation is real. The causation people infer from it is not.
This piece covers what length is actually good for, the limits genuinely worth counting to, and how to read the numbers a Word Counter gives you without drawing the wrong conclusion from them.
Why long pages rank, and why length is not the reason
Longer pages do correlate with better rankings. The mistake is assuming word count is the mechanism. Three duller explanations account for most of the effect.
- Query coverage. A longer article usually addresses more of the related questions a searcher has, which means it matches more queries and satisfies more of them.
- Effort as a proxy. Pages people invested real work in tend to be longer, and also tend to be better researched, better linked and better maintained. Length is a symptom.
- Link attraction. Comprehensive references get cited. Nobody links to a 400-word restatement of something already well covered.
None of this rewards padding. Inflating a 600-word answer to 1,800 words gives you the length without any of the mechanisms that made length correlate in the first place, and it costs you the thing that actually matters: a reader who found their answer quickly and thought well of you for it.
The workable rule is that length should be an output of covering the topic properly, never an input you decide beforehand.
The counts that genuinely have limits
Some numbers are real constraints rather than folklore, and these are worth checking every time.
- Title tags: roughly 580 pixels, which works out around 55–60 characters. Google truncates on width, not character count, so a title full of capitals and wide letters gets cut sooner.
- Meta descriptions: about 155–160 characters on desktop and less on mobile. Write the important half first and treat the tail as expendable.
- Email subject lines: roughly 40 characters before mobile clients start truncating.
- Social posts: hard platform limits that simply reject anything longer.
- Academic and editorial briefs: real limits with real consequences, and usually counted the same way word processors count.
For the character-level ones, count without spaces or with, depending on the limit. Our counter shows both, because the two figures can differ by fifteen per cent on a long paragraph and the wrong one will mislead you.
Reading time is the number your reader feels
Word count is an author-facing number. Reading time is the reader-facing one, and it is the better sanity check. We calculate it at 220 words per minute, a widely used average for adult silent reading of general web material. Technical content is read considerably more slowly, so treat the figure as a floor for anything dense.
The useful question is whether the topic deserves the time. If the counter says twelve minutes and the subject is a settings change your reader wants to make in the next thirty seconds, the article is wrong regardless of how well written it is. If it says two minutes and you are explaining something genuinely complicated, you have probably left out the part that would have helped.
Displaying reading time on the post itself is worth doing. It sets expectations honestly, and readers who know what they are committing to are measurably more likely to finish.
Reading the keyword strip properly
Our counter shows the six terms you repeat most, with a percentage. Two things about that number. First, there is no target density to hit — search engines stopped rewarding raw repetition a very long time ago, and writing towards a percentage produces text that reads like it was written towards a percentage. Second, the figure ignores common filler words, so a three per cent share means something rather different from three per cent of all words.
What the strip is genuinely good for is catching accidental repetition. The same verb four times in one section. A product name so frequent the page reads like a brochure. A term sitting far above everything else that is not actually your subject, which usually means the draft has drifted from its own brief.
Treat it as a mirror, not a dial.
A practical way to use the count
- Write the answer first, at whatever length it takes. Do not open with a target.
- Check the reading time. Ask whether the topic earns it. Cut if it does not.
- Compare against what already ranks. Not to match the number, but to see what those pages cover that you have skipped. If they are all much longer, you have probably missed a section, not a word count.
- Check the strip for repetition. Fix anything that has run away from you.
- Run a Spell Checker pass last, once the text has stopped moving. The full checking routine is here.
If a section refuses to get shorter without losing meaning, that is usually a sign it should be its own article with its own internal link, rather than a longer version of this one.
And if the draft feels stodgy rather than long, an Article Rewriter pass will at least show you the padded stock phrases — though read what rewriting tools can and cannot do before you trust the output.