A typical picture: an owner orders website copy, the brief says “3,000 characters per page”, and the invoice is per 1,000 characters. The texts arrive long, tidy and clean on “uniqueness”. But leads from those pages don’t grow. The problem is not the copywriter but what they are paid for. Below are five checks you can do yourself, without knowing SEO, and advice on how to write a brief that has no “characters” in it.
We checked the data from Google’s documentation on October 28, 2026. Where we describe our own practice, we say so directly, and it is not statistics.
1. Google does not count characters
Google Search Central’s page “Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content” asks the author a question: “Are you writing to a particular word count because you’ve heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don’t.)” In plain terms: Google has no preferred length. This version of the page is marked as updated on October 5, 2026; we checked it on October 28, 2026.
This does not mean that short texts are better. It means that length alone is not a reason for a higher position. So the question for your contractor is simple: where did the number in the brief come from? If the answer is “that’s how it’s done” or “that’s how the work is counted”, you have just found the source of the problem.
2. You get what you pay for
When pay is per 1,000 characters, writing longer pays and writing tight does not. Nobody is cheating: that is how any pay-by-volume works. The result is familiar: intros like “in today’s world…”, one thought repeated in different words, generalities before the thing the person came for. This is our practice and the observation of many SEO specialists; we found no single study that measures it, so we won’t quote percentages.
An example from practice: a page about appliance repair was ordered “at 3,000 characters”. The actual answer (what you repair, for how much, how fast, how to book a technician) would fit in three sentences. The rest of the volume went on general musings about how important it is to repair appliances on time. A person who came from search with a broken washing machine does not read that: they are looking for a phone number.
A five-second check: strike out the first paragraph of the page. If the text lost nothing, you paid for fluff. Do the same with the last “summary” paragraph that repeats the intro.
3. Search tells you the length, not the brief
How much to write is decided not “off the top of the head” but by the sites already in Google’s top results for your query. Open the first five results for the main query, for example “oil change London” or “washing machine repair”. See how much text there is and which questions it answers: price, timing, warranty, how to order, what makes it different. If on all five the page is short and to the point, a 3,000-character text will simply drown among answers with no fluff.
The shared practice of Ukrainian SEO teams is this: the length in a brief comes from analysing the niche’s top results, and it is a guideline, not a requirement. There is a flip side: if the top results are detailed pages with tables, examples and answers to ten questions, a short brush-off loses to them not because of “too few characters” but because it covers fewer of the customer’s questions. So we look at how complete the answer is, not at a counter.
Numbers from other people’s cases (3,000–4,000 characters for some pages, less for others) are not universal, and you should not copy them onto your own site.
4. The answer must come first
A person is looking for a price, a deadline, a way to order. If they have to scroll through three paragraphs of company history to reach the answer, they will go back to search and open a competitor. This is our practice and common sense, not a Google rule.
Check: open the page on your own phone. Can you see the price (or “from how much”) and the order button or form without scrolling? If not, the issue is not length but order: the most important at the top, explanations below.
5. Judge by leads, not by uniqueness
Plagiarism-checking services (Advego, Text.ru and similar) show a uniqueness percentage. That is useful to make sure a text is not copied. But it is the service’s own metric, not Google’s: Google’s documentation has no such indicator, and its requirements for text are described differently. Google asks whether the content provides original information, analysis or experience, not what percentage of words differs from other pages. A text can be “100% unique” and empty: a new arrangement of words adds no new facts.
So the real check looks like this:
- Open Search Console (Google’s free service for site owners) → Performance → Search results → the Pages tab. Find the page with the new text and look at clicks and impressions over a period. Compare with what it was before publication.
- In Google Analytics 4, see how many leads (forms, calls, if they are set up as key events) came from exactly that page.
- Give the page time. A few weeks for indexing and first movement; after 2–3 months the direction is visible. Conclusions earlier than that are premature.
Search Console menu names in other languages may differ slightly from those given here; go by the English words in the interface.
How to brief a copywriter without “N characters”
Instead of length, the brief should contain things you can accept the work against:
- Who the page is for and why. Who is searching, what they want to do: compare, learn the price, order.
- Which questions to close. A list of 5–8 customer questions (take them from calls and correspondence, do not invent them). Every question must get an answer.
- What goes on the first screen. Price or range, deadline, button or form.
- What to take from your experience. Real examples, terms, warranties, photos. Competitors do not have this, and an outside author will not write it without your help.
- A benchmark from the top results. Links to 3–5 competitor pages and a short note: what they cover and what they do not. The length then comes out on its own, as a consequence.
- What not to write. General intros, market history, phrases that could be pasted onto any page.
- How we accept it. By the checklist in this article: the first paragraph is needed, the answer is visible at once, all questions are closed, facts are confirmed by you.
In this scheme it is convenient to tie payment to the page or the task, not to characters. That is your contract with the contractor: we do not name prices and do not recommend a specific scheme, we only note that pay per character pushes people to write longer, not better.
Summary
Five checks: is there no number in the brief that Google does not require; is there no fluff in the text; was the length taken from the search top; is the answer visible at once; do you measure the result by leads rather than by a uniqueness percentage. If the answer to two or three of these is “no”, that is a reason to rewrite the brief, not to buy another 10,000 characters.
If the site grows slowly overall, look wider: we covered where people from Google actually land and whether SEO makes sense for you right now compared with ads.
Want a free audit of your Google Ads account? Send us a request: we will look at your account and tell you where money is being spent for nothing. You can show us the texts and pages your ads lead to as well, and we will point out what is not working in them.