If you have just started blogging, from the first posts, you start to wonder:
How long should the blog post be?
In this article, I’ll dive deeper into what the ideal length of a blog post is for beginners and advanced bloggers.
Why Care About the Blog Post Length At All?
When you’re a solopreneur, you need to do a lot of things simultaneously. You might allocate your attention to the presence in social media, blog posts, or creating products. But what will bring the best results? It’s crucial to optimize your efforts to fast-track the growth of your business.
If you’re not taking blog post length into account while creating content, it might be the reason your blog is not ranking well in Google.
The length of a blog post can indeed be important, and it can vary depending on several factors such as industry, topic, audience, and goals.
Longer blog posts tend to perform better on search engine results pages (SERPs) and can provide more meat for search engines to index. They may also attract more organic traffic from search engines and have higher chances of lead conversion. In addition, if you’re monetizing your blog via ads, long-form content is something that will engage with the reader and keep them on the page.
Moreover, it’s the quality of our attention — whether it’s to what’s shown, written, spoken, or even sung — that matters most. Likewise, it’s the quality of content that counts. And when it’s good, it only gets better as you go deeper.
Why There’s No Ideal Blog Post Length For Everyone
When it comes to blog posts, there’s no one-fits-all option.
Here’s why.
Your ideal blog post length will depend on several factors. Here are the most important ones:
- age of your website
- your keyword
- your blog’s size (how many keywords are already covered)
- your competition
Now let’s take a deep dive into these terms and examine them thoroughly.
Your domain age
Let’s say there are two websites. One is a 5-year-old authoritative niche website, and the other one is a newly created domain that barely has any published content at all.
Research shows that an identical piece of content will perform differently in search results, depending on whether it was published on one website or the other.
You may create a perfectly optimized and engaging blog post, however, if it’s published on a new website with no authority, it’s very likely that it will just drown in the sea of content.
If you’re only starting your blog, I feel like it doesn’t make sense to invest heavily in a 5,000-word article. The probability that it will rank sometime is incredibly low.
Underperforming content is the reason why some blog owners only take premium expired domains that have extensive history and backlink profiles.
Your keyword
Before creating any content, you do some keyword research.
However, each keyword is different.
Let’s compare two simple long-tail keywords, ‘where can I study fashion history‘ and ‘how tall is Taylor Swift‘.
Obviously, as user intent is different in both cases, the volume of your article will also vary. While the first keyword can translate into an excellent long-form article, the second one will most likely not become a separate piece of content at all.
Because… who needs a 2,000-word article on Taylor Swift’s height?
Some keywords may suggest providing a big chunk of information, and some are just about reading a few lines or seeing one exact picture. That’s normal. Understanding user intent is a part of the keyword research. Over time, you’ll start seeing the difference between the two.
Your blog’s size
Your blog’s size might be different from your domain age.
You might have set up a website years ago but you haven’t been consistently posting content. Sounds familiar?
In this case, you might have an old domain, but your blog’s size might be small.
To start ranking your content, Google needs to be aware of the main topics of your website and your content. If there’s little to no content on your website, it’s hard for the algorithm to figure out whether it’s worth some attention.
Alternatively, you might have started only a few months back, but you already have over 100 articles on your website and they have already started to rank in Google.
As with the domain’s age, if you create an amazing piece of content, probably not that many people will see it.
Your competition
Ideally, on the competition because before you target any of the keywords, you need to see the competition on Google’s search results pages, and decide whether it makes sense to target those keywords.
Because if you see well-established websites, such as entrepreneur.com, businessinsider.com, or cnn.com on the top positions, chances are it doesn’t even make sense to try and go for this keyword. What you want to see are blogs, and small niche websites.
Research Data on Optimal Blog Post Length
The minimal length of a blog post, according to various sources, is around 400-500 words. But what’s the ideal blog post length?
The major players in the SEO industry have researched this question though, and here are some insights.
- Articles over 3,000 words get 77% more backlinks than shorter articles (under 1,000 words). Source: Backlinko
Why does this happen? 3000 words are the volume of a small research. It’s enough to cover the subject, the details. An article of 3,000 words provides a unique insight into the topic.
- While 81% of articles with 7,000+ words are shared, only 41% of articles under 600 words are shared. Source: Semrush
7,000 words is a lot. Typically, articles of that length are guides and lists of something. So on average, you’ll have 3-5 such posts on your blog.
- Articles with 2,100- 2,400 words are considered to be the “ideal blog post length” for SEO. Source: HubSpot
Steps to Take to Define the Optimal Blog Post Length
- Choose your keyword
As we’ve discussed earlier, your keyword might largely determine whether you should create a long-form blog post or just a short 600-700-word article.
If you’ve found a good low-competition keyword but it doesn’t make sense to create an entire blog post optimized for this very keyword, what you can do is consider implementing several keywords into one blog post. You might have 10 keywords with a search volume of 10-20 people a month.
- Check out the competition
Check out how long are the posts from your competitors.
To outperform them on search results pages, you’ll need to create a better piece of content. And better means informative, which also means more extensive.
However, you need to maintain a balance between blog post volume and user experience. Don’t overload it with information that is not aligned with user search intent.
3. Define the optimal blog post length.
You can learn more on the ideal blog post length recommended by researchers in this YouTube video:
Summary: What’s The Ideal Length of a Blog Post?
According to some data and recommendations, an ideal blog post length can range from 1,700 to 2,500 words. This length is recommended for “How to…” articles and is considered the golden standard by search engines. However, it’s important to note that there is no one-size-fits-all answer when it comes to blog post length.
Ultimately, it’s crucial to balance length with quality and relevance. The content of the blog post should provide valuable information, address the needs of the target audience, and match the search intent of users. So, while length can play a role, the focus should be on creating high-quality content that engages and adds value to the reader experience.
