No, I don't think it takes 1800 words or even 1000 words. What it takes is content that is based on the keyword, that answers the question, that helps the reader. An article that keeps them reading through the end (low bounce rate), that gets them to respond to your recommendation and click through on your affiliate link. Whatever gets them to do that is the right number of words!

Polish people say: paper whitstand everything. Now we use memory instead, but for you is important this part of content wich last in head after living page. Try memorise 300 words and 1800.
To many unimportant things make reader bored. You arent journalist payed per line. Find what pay you. Vale Piotr

The content must be of good value. We write for our visitors and not for Google. The people coming to our websites, they don't have the time to read all content. I believe they mostly scan it and read only the paragraphs that really contains value for them.

I don't understand why Google increases the average words. Perhaps it because of all the competition?

Thanks for sharing this information, Eden.
:-)

I am not certain there is a magic number that we need to get to. The best thing is to post and post again. If your topic is covered in 500 words or more then why add extra words if you are just adding them to make up a number.

That being said it does appear that 800 to 1000 should be a target to aim for.

I am fairly new coming into this and I didn't know the the numbers used to be that low. But I generally hit 1800 when I do mine. I think though that what ever number should be good as long as it is true helpful content. And you have made your point in the end.

It all depends on your niche, keyword, topic, competition. Always do your SERP research. If the top 5 results are in the 800 word range... I'd shoot for 1200.
There are so many factors. I was recently doing some keyword research and the article in position 2 was literally a single paragraph.
I have a few articles with more than 5000 words... one is over 20,000... and they are stuck back on page 3 and 4.
So your best bet is to see what Google has chosen to put on page one already, and aim to be in that ballpark.

David (below) is on the money.

There have been (and still are) people who wish to capture traffic with quickie, low-quality pages.

Sometimes, these lo-qual pages looked like absolute nonsense, with a forest of popular keywords jammed in-between. How annoying is it to be directed to a page like this when you're searching for good answers?

Sometimes, these lo-qual pages are just poorly written faff, plagiarised, 're-spun,' designed to maintain presence, but without offering any value or new insights to visitors.

For all the kinds of pages these lo-qual approaches may generate, Google has a response. They're good at detecting how original your content is, and whether or not it's keyword-stuffed nonsense.

But to respond directly to your question: Longer original articles tend to do better at ranking not just because they are long (this would be a shallow determinant of quality, right?), but because they more often tend to be the better quality articles.

So, when someone advises you that writing longer is better, it's only part of the story. It's just that when you aim to write more about a topic, you will draw deeper from yourself hopefully, and the result will look better than when you write just single a paragraph.

As some of the members here have pointed out - when they get excited about a topic they love, and when they feel like they have a relationship with readers that encourages a sense of conversation, they lose count of the words! I have no doubt that you will find that sweet spot for yourself too, and worries about word count will be gone.

The problem with statistics like that is that you don't know what they're comparing to get their average. They could be looking at very general keywords which need longer articles to rank well.

But it's very likely that when targeting more specific keywords, like we are taught to do, the articles will do well with the 1000 word goal.

I target 1000 words, and my articles usually wind up between 1000 and 1300. So far everything I've been taught here is working, so I'll keep my word goals at the recommended amount from WA!

I'm new here but I don't even concern myself with how many words I have. I'm more concerned about getting my point across in an easy to understand manner.

I do find though that when I write about something I am knowledgeable about than it tends to be 1200 to 1500 words.

Rick

I watched a video from Jay on writing guides that were like 5000 - 6000 words long in order to establish our site as authoritative.

But when I'm doing my keyword research, I do look at my competitors pages to see how many words they've written. Then I try to write more quality content than they have.