Someone always asks for the number, and every honest answer to the question sounds evasive to whoever asked it. So here is the number first, before any caveats: nine hundred to sixteen hundred words for a page answering one question properly, with the warning that hitting it by padding produces a worse page than missing it by being brief and specific.

The reason the number is soft is that length is downstream of scope rather than a decision in its own right. Decide how many sub-questions genuinely belong on the page, answer each of them completely, and the word count arrives on its own without anyone having to count towards a target. Writing to a target is how pages get padded in the first place.

The numbers, at a glance

• Single-question answer page: 900 to 1,600 words, typically four to six sections plus a short action block

• Section length: 80 to 200 words each, which is the measurement that actually affects retrieval

• The opening answer: 40 to 60 words before any context, carrying the complete claim

• When to split instead of extend: past roughly 2,000 words, two focused pages almost always outperform one long one

Why the old comprehensive-page advice stopped working

The three-thousand-word pillar page was a rational response to a ranking system that scored whole documents and rewarded topical coverage. Everything about that logic is intact for classic search. What broke is the assumption that a document's strength transfers to its parts, because retrieval evaluates the parts.

In a chunked world a sprawling guide competes as dozens of fragments, many of which are transitional prose, recaps or setup for the next section. Those fragments dilute rather than support, and the strong ones are surrounded by weak neighbours from the same domain, which runs straight into the source-diversity preference that discourages citing one site repeatedly.

How to arrive at the right length without counting

1. Write the question as a buyer would ask it. One question, in their words, not a keyword phrase.

2. List the sub-questions a satisfied reader would still have. Usually four to six. More than eight means you have two pages.

3. Answer the main question in forty to sixty words. That block goes at the top, before any context whatsoever.

4. Give each sub-question its own section of eighty to two hundred words with a heading that names it.

5. Add the one thing nobody else publishes. A figure, a real example with numbers, a stated method.

6. Stop. If the word count landed at eleven hundred, that was the right length for this question.

The two failure modes, and how to tell them apart

Thin pages fail because they contain no information, not because they contain few words. A four-hundred-word page that states a price band, the conditions attached and the date it applies from is more useful and more citable than fifteen hundred words of hedged generality. If your short page is not performing, test whether it says anything checkable before you assume it needs to be longer.

Bloated pages fail differently and more quietly. They rank respectably, get some traffic, and never get quoted, because no individual fragment carries a complete thought. The diagnostic is the same as for chunking: read the middle third in isolation. If it is mostly recap, transitions and restatement, you have length without substance and cutting will improve every metric that matters.

Different page types, different targets

A definitional answer page, explaining what something is, rarely needs more than eight hundred to twelve hundred words. A comparison page runs longer, thirteen hundred to two thousand, because each option needs its own self-contained treatment and the reader will not accept a summary. A pricing page can be short if the numbers are real, and no length rescues one where every figure is a from-price.

For contractors specifically, the highest-performing shape is usually the shortest one: a plain question, a direct answer with a real number in the first fifty words, four sections handling the obvious follow-ups, and a clear next step. Buyers using an assistant are trying to shorten a decision, and the page that respects that is the page that gets recommended.

Sizing a page correctly

1. Write the buyer question in one line and refuse to widen it while drafting.

2. List the sub-questions and split into two pages if you count more than eight.

3. Put a 40 to 60 word complete answer at the top before any context.

4. Cap each section at 200 words and give it a heading that names the sub-question.

5. Delete every transitional paragraph that exists only to link two sections together.

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