If you write your own blog posts you have realized that not all posts are created equal and this is especially true when it comes to their length. With some posts you may struggle to get close to 300 words. Others you try to turn into a literary opus and try your best not to let it become as long as Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment since you do want people to read it. So, is there a happy medium in between? Just how long is too long for a blog post to be or more accurate how long should a blog post be?
No True Answer
The answer can be somewhat complex and it should be no surprise that there seems to be no one concrete answer. The boutique digital group the Hook Agency analyzed their top performing posts and came up with an answer of 1,705 words as the best length. Yoast SEO (you might use their WordPress plugin!) recommends between 700 and 800. The writing blog The Write Practice recommends between 600 and 1,250 for good content but posts of 2,450 words performed the best. The SEO training site Backlinko says that content that is over 3,000 words generates more backlinks while content that is 1,000 to 2,000 words generates more social media engagement. That’s a lot of disparity by people who claim the title of expert!
Where they do not differ is on the minimum length. To meet minimum SEO requirements a post should be at least 275 to 300 words. Shorter posts can (but may not) generate more social media discussion but will not rank with SEO. This length allows for keywords and links to be added and to provide enough information about the post’s topic. But to maximize SEO it should be longer. The standard blog is usually around 300-600 words and your typical professional-style blog is about 750 words.
More Can Be Better and It Can Be Worse
Now, that is not to say that every single post will be long. When writing you will have topics that just do not have a lot of information available or topics that don’t need to be expanded on a lot. If you are creating fresh content regularly this will not be a problem with SEO.
In the end as well readability is also a factor. If a post is not readable by the audience people will not read it. Keeping the post structured well and easy to read is in many ways more important than the length of the piece. For many readers quality is better than quantity. If the information that people are looking for is not easily gleaned from a piece you are not getting the maximum amount of benefits from that piece.
Backlinko Study
For the purpose of answering the original question we will examine the Backlinko study, where they analyzed over 900 million posts all across the web. It should really be no surprise that longer content will generate more backlinks with it, 77% more backlinks in fact! Longer content will be filled with more information to be used as a source which means more people will link to it. Longer content also allows for the opportunity for more keywords, headings, links and pictures to be added, which also helps to raise SEO rankings.
Are you more concerned about having your content shared on social media instead? While content that is 3,000 words or more is shared more than content less than 1,000 words, content that is 1,000 to 2,000 words is shared much more frequently. According to Backlinko’s study it is shared 56% more than content that is less than 1,000 words.
So How Can I Expand My Content?
Getting a piece of content over 1,000 words sometimes is not easy but there are many ways to expand your word count in ways that can be informative and are not just for the sake of expanding it with fluff and filler. Providing additional information about a subject that is mentioned is a great way to increase your word count while providing relevant information for your readers at the same time.
Additional information could be as simple as a sentence or two about a person or place that was brought up in the piece. Along the same lines it could be as simple as adding information about an event, either a historical event or plugging an event that you have coming up. It can be easy to add extra relevant content to a piece, this paragraph after all has added 75 extra words to this piece!
But Won’t Length Prevent People From Reading My Content?
That is of course a valid concern for many people today, given the reduction in attention span. A 1,500 word piece generally takes about 6-7 minutes to read. In the grand scheme of things that is not a lot of time but some people may feel that they do not have that time to devote to your content. You may have noticed that some pieces of content across the web have included the approximate reading time in the piece so reader’s know what to expect. You may want to add that.
In reality, if a piece of content is well written and easy to read many readers will not care how long it takes to read it. They want to read what is in the piece and once they get going they will not stop until they get to the end. You could say that they get in the zone. We hope that you are since you have made it this far.
How Long is 1,000 Words?
In a word processor you can generally fit about 500 words onto a page single spaced. That means to meet that magical 1,000 word mark you will need at least two pages. Not everyone has this in them. To write this length of a piece takes time and you may not have that time to devote to something like this day in and day out and that is understandable. You have a business to run and a family to take care of.
If you have made it this far, this piece is about 1,150 words so you have some sort of comparison. How long did it take you to read it? It took a little over one hour to write with research and proofreading combined and another 15 minutes to add it to WordPress, get a featured image formatted and format the actual post. Good content takes time, at least we hope you think this was a good piece.
That is where Nicely Done Sites can help. Our content creation services can help to add blog content to your website and share it on social media. The content can be 300 words it can be 3,000 it doesn’t matter. We can help. Blog content is one of the best ways to boost your SEO rankings while generating social media interest at the same time. We offer content creation to all of our clients and you can check out our own blog at the Nicely Done Sites Blog.