1,000 SERPs · · 1 min read
Do long-form posts still win on Google? We checked 1,000 SERPs
We pulled the top 10 results for 1,000 B2B marketing keywords and measured every page's length, structure and freshness.
By Alan
LinkedIn ghostwriter & B2B content strategist
Key finding
3.1×more page-one rankings for 2,400+ word posts
TL;DR
- Posts over 2,400 words appeared on page one 3.1× more often than posts under 1,000 words.
- Length alone wasn’t the driver: long posts also had more subheadings, original images and internal links.
- Posts updated in the last 12 months outranked older posts of the same length.
How we did it
We chose 1,000 keywords with commercial intent in B2B marketing, pulled the top 10 organic results for each in a US location, and crawled every ranking page. For each page we recorded word count, number of H2 and H3 headings, images, internal links and the last-updated date.
What we found
The median page-one result was 1,900 words long. Pages over 2,400 words made up 38% of page-one results but only 12% of the pages we crawled from positions 11–30.
When we compared long pages with similar structure, the gap shrank to 1.4×. Depth and structure matter more than raw length.
What to do with this
- Write as long as the topic needs, and structure it with clear subheadings.
- Refresh your best posts once a year and update the date honestly.
- Don’t pad short answers to hit a word count.