How Long Should Your Blog Posts Be?
When writing a blog post, you know you should be using a tone that falls in line with your brand and provides enough detail to demonstrate value to your users. But if you’ve ever written an article that felt too short or worried that you were writing too much, you may have considered the all-important question: how long should my blog post be?
The question is a complicated one without one true answer. But understanding the purpose of your content can help you determine the optimal length for your posts.
Quality over quantity
First, you should know that the quality of your content is going to matter far more than its length. For example, a high-quality 300-word post is going to yield more overall value than a 10,000-word post that’s mostly fluff.
Conversely, a well-written 10,000-word post will always outperform a shoddy 300-word one. Covering the right topics and committing to content value should be your first priority; only then should you start worrying about content length.
What’s the goal of your blog?
We can consider multiple independent goals when deciding the optimal blog post length:
- Links and SEO—For some content marketers, the end goal is earning as many links as possible and looking good to search engines. If this is your goal, your content length should provide Google with enough content to crawl and be filled with citable material for other bloggers.
- Social shares—For others, social shares are more important; the optimal post length is one that attracts the most shares on social media, ultimately netting more brand exposure.
- User engagement—You might also want to consider length for your user engagement. Here, the optimal length is one that encourages your users to stay on a page for as long as possible, or one that encourages more conversions.
- Brand reputation—Finally, you may tailor your post length to improve your brand reputation, focusing on pure user value or journalistic integrity rather than any of the other goals.
You may have one of these goals as your main priority, or seek all four of them in different capacities. Keep your priorities in mind as you review the following information.
Links and SEO
The “optimal” length of content for SEO has changed over the years. The industry standard advice a few years ago was somewhere between 500 to 800 words. This length was considered long enough to help your brand target specific keywords, but short enough to be digestible to the average reader.
Today, however, the general consensus skews a bit longer. One study from Moz and BuzzSumo found that while the vast majority of content is less than 1,000 words, posts of 1,000 words or more tend to attract more links than any other length.
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A more recent study by SEMRush found that the difference in length between top-3 posts and rank-20 posts was a whopping 45%; in other words, longer content tends to higher rank.
If your main goal is SEO, longer posts are better. Aim for at least 1,000 words.
Social shares
Social shares are a bit more complex to analyze. The same Moz/BuzzSumo study found that posts of 1,000 words or more tend to get more shares than other posts in the same way that longer posts earn more links. However, the same study found that certain types of posts are far more highly shared than others. For example, quizzes and listicles (as you might expect) get more shares than standard articles; these content types tend to be shorter than others.
You might also find that shorter posts are more shareable because they’re more digestible. It doesn’t take readers as long to get through your work, and they might be more likely to share that work with their social contacts.
User engagement
Intuitively, you might reason that shorter posts are better for user engagement; after all, they’re more easily digestible. But you might also reason that longer posts are better, since they offer more detail and may afford you more chances to offer CTAs and other engagement opportunities.
According to one report, the average web user only reads 28% of the words during an average page visit, regardless of page length. Why? Because most web users who consume content tend to scan it, rather than read it in-depth.
This fact should caution you to spend more time formatting your text properly (with shorter paragraphs, clearer headings, and bold and italic fonts), but also help you lean toward long-form content. After all, if users are only reading a quarter of what you’re writing, it’s better to have them read 280 words of a 1,000-word post than 28 words of a 100-word post.
Brand reputation
Finally, we have to consider your brand reputation—and this is the most subjective point of all. If you want your brand to be known for concise, witty posts, it may be in your best interest to churn out posts of just a few hundred words—even if you earn fewer links per post on average.
On the other hand, if you want to be known as a thought leader with highly detailed, exhaustive content that covers heavy industry issues, you should only produce posts of several thousand words (or more).
Blog length: the bottom line
The bottom line here is that there’s no single correct answer for how long your blog posts should be, though you may seek one length over another if your specific brand would benefit from it.
Consider your priorities and options carefully: What are your goals for publishing blog posts? Are you trying to attract links to boost your SEO? Are you trying to engage readers? Are you trying to encourage social shares of your content? Depending on your goals, your blog post word count requirements may differ.
If you’re ever in doubt, just cover all your bases and create a wide variety of content in different sizes. You can always measure your results and discover the most valuable content for your brand by testing various lengths and seeing what produces the most value for you.
