The verdict
I give clinics enforced minimums. Home 1,200 words, service pages 900 to 1,200, location pages 1,200, About 500, Contact 300, blog posts 900. Google says it has no preferred word count and Google is right. These are not ranking targets. They are the point below which a page has not finished saying what it is for.
I hand clients a table of numbers, and I know perfectly well that Google does not use them.
Those two things sit together more comfortably than people expect, but only if you are honest about what the number is doing. It is not a lever. It is a brief.
The numbers
What I enforce on a clinic site
- Home: 1,200 words. It has to say what you treat, where you are, who you are, and what happens when someone gets in touch. That is four jobs.
- Service and technique pages: 900 to 1,200. A range rather than a floor, because above 1,200 you are usually writing a health article instead of describing your treatment.
- Location pages: 1,200. The highest floor on the site, because this is the page most often written as a paragraph with a town name swapped in.
- About: 500. Enough for the practitioners to be real people with credentials attached.
- Contact: 300. A deliberately low number. This page has one job.
- Blog posts: 900. Below that the post is usually a note that should have been a section on an existing page.
Google’s position, and why it does not contradict mine
Google’s guidance on people-first content puts the question in a list of warning signs that you are writing for a search engine rather than a person. It asks whether you are writing to a particular word count because you have heard or read that Google has a preferred word count, and answers its own question: no, it does not.
That is correct, and I would not argue with it. There is no threshold at which a page starts ranking.
What the number does is different. It is a test applied before the page is written, not after. If a practice cannot get to 900 words about a treatment they perform several times a week, the problem is not the writing. It is that nobody has worked out what the page is supposed to tell somebody.
Where the numbers came from
Not from a study. From the point in enough clinic audits where a page stopped being able to answer an obvious question.
The 1,200 on a location page is the clearest case. At 400 words a location page says the town name, the address and a sentence about convenience. At 1,200 it has room for parking, the surrounding neighbourhoods, which practitioners work from that site, and what is different about that location. One of those is a page. The other is a placeholder with a keyword in it.
The failure mode, and it is a bad one
Somebody takes the 900 and pads to it.
That produces exactly what Google’s spam policies describe as scaled content abuse, large amounts of unoriginal content that provides little to no value, no matter how it is created. A padded 900-word page is worse than an honest 400-word one, because it takes longer to read before the reader works out that it says nothing.
My note: if a page is short and correct, I will sign it off short. The minimum is a prompt to go and find out more, not a licence to write more about less.
The page where the number is a ceiling
Contact, at 300. I have seen clinic contact pages carrying the full practice history, three paragraphs on philosophy and a list of conditions. All of it pushes the phone number below the fold.
That page is measured on one thing. Everything else on it is in the way, and I will cut a contact page down as readily as I will send a service page back for being thin.
How this fits with the rest of the structure
Word counts are the last check I run, not the first. The page has to exist and have a job before its length is worth discussing, and on a clinic site that means the condition pages and the hub above them come first. Google’s own advice on organising a site is that a logical organisation helps search engines and users understand how your pages relate to the rest of your site, which is a structural question, not a length one.
The short version
- Home 1,200, service 900 to 1,200, location 1,200, About 500, Contact 300, blog 900.
- Google has no preferred word count and says so directly. That is true.
- The number is a brief, not a target. It is applied before writing, not after.
- Location pages get the highest floor because they are the most often faked.
- Padding to the number is worse than missing it.
- Contact is a ceiling at 300. One job.
- Short and correct gets signed off. The minimum is a prompt to find out more.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. SEO for chiropractors covers where the effort belongs in a practice, and an SEO audit is where the page inventory gets measured against what each page is for.
