A Content Length and Planning Exercise for Your Web Site

You Don't Need the Science - Just Know Where to Point the Rocket

A real estate website has the potential for hundreds of pages of content that are all valuable to one or more of the site's visitors over time. Questions come up about content length, or the best length for the text items on a web page. Usually writers talk about it in terms of "word count", so let's use that measure. If you purchase content for your site on some of the freelance sites, word count is used a lot for buyers to describe projects and for writers to bid them.

In other articles on this subject, I like to use another word along with discussions of content, and that word is "intent." Content decisions should always follow intent decisions when planning a web page. The intent of the page we'll use as an example here is to bring information to our visitors about the "title and closing" process in our area. We won't get area-specific, but your pages should point out items that tend to be unique for your market.

We've decided that there are prospects out there that want information on what happens in a transaction as it's related to the title company, escrow process and settlement. We decide to create a page to explain it to them. As we develop our outline, items that might appear include (key phrases for SEO maybe?):

title insurance explanation;

title commitment or binder;

earnest money;

settlement statement;

title search;

easements and encroachments; and

surveys or improvement reports.

It didn't take five minutes to come up with that list of seven items, and I'm sure that you can easily add some to it. In the context of what the ideal content length would be for this page, really there isn't an answer! The reason is that there is too much content here for one page, and here's why:

The visitor likely wanted one item answered and there's too much to wade through for the answer.

There are too many key phrases to choose just one for search engine optimization.

Far from a problem, this is a great situation! We have seven pages worth of content here. Each of these pages can be optimized for one key phrase which a visitor might use to find it. Each page will likely have less than 500 or so words, so our visitor won't get tired of looking for their answer. We can build one page of summary content, with each item as a bullet with a link to the detail page. That's seven relevant internal links....great SEO!

As you can see, the decision of content length is made for you if you start with the "intent" decision and work it through with your visitor's needs in mind. It isn't rocket science, but it helps if you know which end of the rocket to point at the sky. By the way, this article's word count is approximately 470.