What is the ideal length of a blog post?
Blog posts can be an excellent way to approach both search engine optimization and audience interaction. On one hand, blog posts give you fresh content on your site on a periodic basis, which can help your page ranking. They also give you a chance to incorporate keywords and phrases that people are searching for. On the other hand, a blog post is a way for you to provide valuable information to your audience, and you may even get them to comment on these posts and engage in a dialogue with your company.
But how long should these posts be, and how much writing do you actually need to do? The reality is that it depends on a wide variety of factors. You need to consider what you’re trying to do with the blog post, what your goals are as a company, what your target audience wants to read and much more. Here are a few basic guidelines to keep in mind.
Writing short posts
In some cases, it’s helpful to have relatively short posts that are around 300 words long. Some research indicates that you’re more likely to get commenters with a short article. People are more likely to quickly read what you’ve written and give feedback. This can help to create conversations on social media platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn.
Writing medium posts
That said, people aren’t as likely to share incredibly short-form content. It doesn’t provide them with as much information, so while it can create a dialogue, it may not gain much traction or expand your audience. For that, you may be wise to write posts that run up to 1,500 words. Even just doubling the length of a short post—moving it up to 600 words—makes it more likely that someone will share your content with their audience.
Writing long posts
Finally, there are those who say that the ideal blog post should be around 2,500 words. Part of the reason is that it gives you a lot more room to incorporate valuable keywords. If you try to put more than a few keywords in a 300-word post, it can start to feel spammy. But if you have 2,500 words to work with, you can incorporate long-tail keywords much more naturally.
A variety of posts
One thing to consider is that you don’t have to make all of your posts uniform. Maybe you want to experiment with short posts and see if you can get valuable conversations going, but you also want to share longer content and see if you can get it in front of more eyes. Some of your short posts could be focused on simply answering questions that your target audience has, while longer posts could be focused on more complex topics and keyword usage. You are certainly free to use both of these together, rather than confining yourself to just one style.
Here at Content Customs, we bring decades of valuable experience in content creation, and we write tens of thousands of blog posts every year. We can help you get the content you need—content that resonates with your audience and gets the results you’re looking for. Just give us a call today to begin talking with our team and learning more about how we can help you accomplish your goals.
