How Long Is the Ideal Blog Post?
It has been shown many times that blogging is an excellent way to increase organic traffic and page rank. Blog posts help you generate consistent content, they allow you to add keywords on a regular basis and you can use them to answer questions and address issues that your readers are interested in. But you may wonder exactly how much content you need. If you can answer a question in 100 words, is that enough? Are you better off writing 1,000 words, which may be longer than most of your on-site content? Does it even make a difference at all? Let’s dig into it a bit deeper.
What Are Your Goals?
The first thing to ask yourself is simply what goals you have with your post. For instance, some studies have found that shorter posts are often better for user engagement, as they get people to comment on the post and discuss it. You can’t go into much detail in 300 words, but you can count on more people actually reading the entire post and then making a comment. This type of engagement is great if you’re doing social media marketing or if you want feedback from your readers. One example post clocked in with 275 words, but it gained enough traction that there were around 300 comments on the post — it received more comments than the initial word count. That’s impressive, and it shows that you don’t necessarily need much content to get the level of interaction you’re seeking.
The Value of Longer Posts
That said, other studies have found that posts running from 2,100 words to 2,400 words performed the best when it came to SEO. That length allowed for the use of a lot of keywords without making it look stuffy. The content was readable and provided a lot of valuable information. It could address many topics. All of this helps. The study that settled on this length had looked at the SEO performance of thousands of posts, so there was plenty of data to back it up.
Answering Specific Questions
Blog posts are often used to answer questions, and you need to consider the specifics of those questions when looking at the length. If you’re writing a legal blog post about the BAC limit for drivers in the United States, for instance, you may be able to quickly point out that most drivers are held to the 0.08% limit, with the exception of commercial drivers and underage drivers. You can break this down in under 300 words. If you’re writing a tech post explaining how to partition a hard drive and install multiple operating systems on the same device, though, you’ll need far more words. The reader may have no idea how to begin, and they need to understand both the core concepts and the exact steps to take. In other words, your length may be determined in part by what question you’re answering and what goal you have for that post.
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