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I’ve seen pages rank #1 with like 200 words, while my 2000 word landing page was top 10 for that keyword.
But in the grand scheme of things, I was being beaten at 1 keyword by a company that did 1 thing only in 1 location only and were happy about it. We were nationwide, had multiple services, multiple locations and attacked their keywords from multiple angles, such as different names for the same service, so eventually nabbing their ranking was a matter of SEO pride, not business necessity.
My point is don’t fixate on individual instances of short content outranking more in-depth content. That short content was high quality – it addressed the query well, but did nothing else.
You’re ignoring what they’re getting wrong. Good SEO casts as wide a net as possible.
And the majority of results for the majority of queries are longer word counts. But sure, out of the billions of queries out there, some low word count pages will rank for some very specific terms.
