Will shortening down the amount of text on my pages affect it's SEO performance?

[Liquid2015]

My website has several pages with a lot of text that becomes pretty boring.

I'm looking at shortening down the amount of copy on each page but then within the updated, shortened copy, integrating more target keywords naturally.

Will shortening down the current copy have a negative effect on my SEO performance?

[Tenlo]

It could, but it also could help your ranking.  The amount of text is not important as much as how relevant Google sees it compared to the search query, so if you are removing superfluous words and redundant passages they you should see an increase as your pages are more user friendly. If you remove good copy that was considered helpful then you would expect to see decreases.

[EGOL]

I spend much of my time improving articles on a long-established site.  Most of these articles are already long - 1000 to 3000 words - with multiple images.

The improvements are usually adding a new section to beef up the length and give the article relevance to a new suite of keywords or make it relevant to topics in the recent news.   Do these help the rankings?   If the site is already near the top of the first page for the root query, it usually doesn't.  If it is deep in the SERPs at position 50 to 90 it usually does.

Regardless of how the ranking for the root keyword changes, these improvements often increase the traffic - because they expose the site to new keywords.

but then within the updated, shortened copy, integrating more target keywords naturally.

If you do a good job of this, I think you will get more traffic, and it might be a better result that moving the rankings up.

[DickensLawGroup]

Had the same question, these answers are helpful, thanks!