Have you ever wondered how many words to have on a page or blog post of your property website?

It’s not an uncommon question that business owners have when they’re looking for new content. This can be for someone who is either creating content for their existing property website, or brand-new site.

The answer to the “how many words” question will vary depending on if it’s being written for someone in search of information via the search engines (i.e., searching for “property website design”), and who it is being read by.

It’s all about your audience

It goes without saying that your audience would be the most important aspect of any writing created for your property website; everything you write should cater towards them rather than yourself as a writer with intentions to create accurate, informative pieces about topics related specifically and solely to them – anything else does no justice because property website visitors need help making decisions about whether your products/services are right for them.

You have one purpose when you are writing for your audience, and that is to make sure that you’re sharing enough information and detail so they can decide what the next step in their process should be. This could be deciding whether to contact you, buy from you, sign up for your newsletter or read more of your content.

There is no set number of words that is right for every circumstance. Sometimes you may have 300 words on a page and in other cases, you may have in excess of 3,000 or more.

Don’t make this mistake

What you do want to avoid is creating “thin content”. This is where you might create a long form blog post with many words but very little or no authentic content. This is easily identified by the search engines and will undoubtedly This will harm your rankings. See Googles guide to thin content.

Search engines work on the principle of presenting the best possible results that match what is being searched for. The web pages that come up the highest are those with answers that closest match the search intent or question.

When you’re planning a new page or blog post for your property website, one of the best and probably first things you can do is scope out what else is out there from a competition point of view. Thankfully this is easy and something that can be done in just a couple of minutes.

Learn from your competition

A good example would be that if you’re writing a new blog post about the benefits of renting a property from your HMO (House of Multiple Occupation) business. A keyword someone could be searching within Google for this is: “shared house for rent” or “shared flat for rent”.

Opening Google and performing a search for “shared house for rent” will show you the top 10 results. If you do a search on the page for the word “blog” you will more than likely see a few of the results are blog posts about the said topic. Open each blog post (at least 5 if possible) and now you should look at how many words are on each of these pages to understand what the search engines are looking for.

Once you’ve visited, you’ll want to check how many words are on each page. You can do this by using a free tool such as WordCounter.

Copy and paste the URL for each page or blog post into WordCounter, making a note of the total number of words. Once you’ve finished, take an average of these results by adding them all together and then dividing. The final number is the minimum number of words that you should be considering if you’re looking to rank your new page or blog post in the search engines. It’s always a good idea to add a further 10-20%.

You should then know how many words you are aiming for. A word of warning… do make sure it is engaging and share the content with members of your team to make sure it reads well.

Make sure to not focus too much on a specific number of words, but rather to primarily help a visitor on your property website. Use as many words as you need for them to be able to clearly understand and take the next step in their purchasing journey with you.