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.
Other Articles From AllBusiness.com:
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.