For years, SEO agencies have told businesses the same thing: if you want to rank, you need more content.
1,500 words. 2,000 words. Maybe 2,500 words just to be safe.
William Nozak says it's time to kill the word count arms race.
In this episode of The Search Hustle Podcast, William kicks off a new series exploring the connection between SEO, content, and web design, and why meaning, structure, and visual organization may matter more than simply publishing longer pages.
For decades, SEO evolved around text. First came keyword density and stuffing. Then marketers moved toward topical depth and massive content silos. Eventually, studies showing that longer content often ranked well led agencies to assume that length itself was the reason.
The result was thousands of websites filled with bloated articles designed to hit arbitrary word counts rather than answer the customer's question efficiently.
William argues that modern search engines and AI systems don't simply process a page as a giant collection of words.
They process information architecture.
That means every page communicates through two different channels: textual semantics and visual semantics.
Textual semantics is what your content actually says. Visual semantics is how that information is structured and represented through comparison tables, step-by-step lists, specification grids, callouts, cards, and other components.
William uses a roofing website as an example.
One company publishes a 2,400-word article answering how long a roof lasts, but the actual answer is buried several paragraphs deep.
Another publishes a 900-word page that immediately answers the question, provides a table comparing asphalt shingles, metal, tile, and slate, and then explains the factors that influence those numbers.
The shorter page can actually communicate the information more clearly because the relationships between the entities and their attributes are explicit.
This becomes even more important with AI search.
AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other answer engines need clean, extractable information. Direct answers, comparison tables, lists, and structured components make it easier for machines to identify individual claims and potentially use that information when constructing an answer.
For this episode's homework, William challenges businesses to audit their highest-traffic informational pages for long paragraphs that should actually be tables, processes, lists, or visual components. He also recommends eliminating arbitrary word count requirements and performing a five-second mobile skim test on important service pages.
The goal isn't to make every page shorter.
It's to make every page clearer.
Stop writing for the 2012 text-matching bot. Start designing pages where meaning, structure, and visual clarity do the heavy lifting.
Featured Book
Lead Leak explores what happens after your marketing generates a lead but before that opportunity becomes revenue. William examines the hidden gaps in tracking, CRM systems, follow-up, sales handoffs, and internal processes that can cause valuable prospects to quietly disappear.
Lead Leak by William Nozak
