Find the optimum length for your health care webpages

How long—or short—should your webpage be? A look at the numbers provides some practical insight.

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When it comes to webpage length and SEO, we all want the same as Goldilocks: A page that’s not too long, not too short, but juuuust right.

With that kind of confidence, we’d all live happily ever after, right?

Maybe, but a problem stands in our way: Page ranking lacks the clear cause and effect of fairy tales. Sure, we know Google’s algorithm penalizes “thin” content and favors time spent on the page, but the rest of the mix seems as opaque as a cold bowl of porridge—including the role word count plays.

We took a different angle to find the answer, focusing on health care.

What we found—and how we found it

Our quest started with MarketMuse, a consultancy using artificial intelligence and machine learning to boost client content and content strategy.

We asked the firm to look at popular webpages for hospitals featured on U.S. News & World Report’s latest Honor Roll. For each hospital, we wanted average word counts for the most popular pages overall. We also wanted averages for the most-viewed pages for two common specialties—cancer and cardiology.

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