10 long articles vs 40 short article - which is better?

If we are talking about a fresh website, which is better to publish 10 articles of 4000 words or 40 articles of 1000 words?
What would bring more traffic and weight/authority to a new website?

80/500 word high quality

Hi,

I think it depends on your keywords and your competitors. You can check it with surfer SEO.

And it depends on the quality of your content. Are you able to rank for many keywords in your 4k post on one topic? or is it better to cover 40 topics?

I think in most niches it's better to cover more topics with high-quality content. Once your post starts ranking, you can optimize them.

If you launch an affiliate website, you can set up a mix of some money pages and informatives pages...

I'm not an expert but this is a resume of what I learned.

10 long articles provided they’re seo optimised

25 x 1600

depends on the niche, keywords, competition, etc. For instance, if you're in a tough niche (seo, web hosting, loans, etc) you will want as much content as possible, and also to optimize it perfectly. And even then, it won't be enough cause you need backlinks and brand authority and aged domain with aged content and all that crap. But 10 articles of 4k words each is recommended in such a niche.

On the other side, if you're in a narrow niche with very little competition like, for example... I don't know.... dog painting maybe... balloon inflating.... or other nonsense like that, you will want 40 articles of 1k words each, or even better, 80 articles of 500 words each cause the niche is so narrow and competition most likely so weak that you can target 1 keyword with each article, so the more articles you write the more traffic you'll get, hence why you will want to use 40-80 articles of 500-1000 words each.

And there's obviously the in-between niches which will also require different number of words, depending on which keywords you are targeting but more importantly, depending on who your competition on 1st page of google is and what they are doing. If most sites on the 1st page of google in your in-between niche usually have 400-800 words worth of content on their pages you will want to copy them and not overdeliver on content when a few powerful backlinks will help you much more to outrank them.

Anyway, as a general rule, you will want to look at google's first page and see what your competition's content is averaging in terms of words, and try to mimic that. If the sites on the 1st page have between 1200 and 3000 words worth of content (just an example), it's obvious that you can't get away with 500 words article, so in that case a 2000 words article will be recommended to even have a chance of ranking on first 2-3 pages.

50 X 800. More room for long tail kws per post. Anything above 700-800 mark is pretty much decent, if it's readable.

The longer, the better. Fact that longer articles do rank better has been proven in a billion case studies. The option to put as many secondary keywords as you want into the article and not completely over-optimizing it is a massive benefit.

I would not bother with anything below 1000 words. My minimum nowadays is 2K words.

20 articles with 2000 to 2500 words will do good. Optimize the content for search intent and worthful for users to be engaged in the article.

for google in public 10 long articles SEO optimized
in reality 40 short articles will perform better

I would say 40 articles of 1000 words would be better...

How about 30 info articles of 1000 words and 3 best of articles of 3500 each.

4000 words per article are too much. Better to go with 1500-2000/article.

10 x 4000 word pillar articles, and then 40 x 1000 (10 for each pillar) as supporting articles. These are to build topical relevance and internal links. In short both!

Pillars target high traffic KW's, and supports target low traffic easy to rank keywords. This is the best long term approach.

I think 40 Articles of 1000 words. It's good.

Depends on the keywords you are targeting and the user intent. Check the top 10 pages ranking for a keyword, check the word count and there is your answer.

Long-form articles like 3000+ word counts are no longer working for me. Now, I post separate dedicated articles for all long tails and LSI keywords and interlink them wherever possible.

When I used to include them in the main article, they either don't rank or rank on the second page due to the lack of keyword optimization.

you are doing 40 articles with 2000 words each on the same niche? that's 80.000 words?? its like a writing a book.. this doesn't have any sense to me.

Add a combination of the number of articles. having a consistent number of words on every article already doesn't look natural. Have a few with over 1600 words and many with 1000 words.

Donomar said:

you are doing 40 articles with 2000 words each on the same niche? that's 80.000 words?? its like a writing a book.. this doesn't have any sense to me.

Click to expand...

You are joking?

The days of thin content, 5 x 500 word articles site have long gone if you are building anything serious.

I've been reverse engineering a site this morning that get's almost 200k visits per month, page word counts average around 3800. These range from 1800 to almost 7k words on a page.

They have 153 pages on the site.

40 articles optimized specifically for their targetted keywords.