Have you read anything about how long should a blog post be? I read a lot of blogs about blogging and I see posts on this topic all the time. The answers run a very wide range, from a few hundred words to a few thousand words. Of course, everyone you read says that they have the definitive answer. But since they are all so different, how do you know which guru is right?
Is there a definitive answer? How long should a blog post be?
How Long Should a Blog Post Be?
There is no good answer to that question. It's too general.
People blog for all kinds of reasons, so that answer depends on what you want to accomplish with your blog post.
Say you have a blog where you answer a question of the day. This could be a very short post and you rely on social media and existing reader engagement for your traffic. You probably post every day, maybe even several times a day. 100 words might even be long for something like this.
On the other hand, maybe you have a blog where you take some topic and analyze it thoroughly. Maybe it's a car blog and you completely take a different model of car apart in every post. There isn't a part of the car that you leave out. This could easily be thousands of words long. Certainly at least 1,000 words.
With a blog like that you probably promote it on social media, but you also want to get traffic from the search engines, like Google.
My Experience
I created my first blog strictly for SEO purposes. I really didn't care if it brought in comments or not. They were nice, but not my goal.
I didn't have a blog at first. I started with a website to promote the products in my network marketing business. You can only reasonably target a few keywords on a single page, so I added the blog because it allows me to write posts that target additional keywords for that product, then send the traffic back to the main page through internal links.
So for me the question is, how long should a blog post be for SEO?
Blogging for SEO
Back when I started my blog, about 9 years ago, most of my posts were only about 300 words. That was enough for my purposes back then. Then they increased to 500 words. Now I usually target 1,000 words.
When blogging for SEO you want to make sure that you have enough content for the search engine spiders to analyze and figure out what you're writing about. Right now 1,000 words seems to work for that. It could change tomorrow.
Blogging for People
Hopefully it is obvious that you should also keep people in mind when you blog. How long should a blog post be for people? That's harder to answer. That gets into personal preferences, and I can only speak for mine.
I prefer to read posts that are about 1,000 to about 1,500 words long. In addition to my online activities, I have stay-at-home dad and homeschool teacher activities to take care of, so I don't have a lot of time to dedicate to reading long posts. I think 1,000 words or so is enough to analyze a topic in sufficient depth. If you need more space you could always break it up into a two-part series, or more even.
As Long As It Takes
There is another viewpoint that I like too. Instead of focusing on a target length, your topic determines the ideal length. If you're dealing with a bigger topic it might take 2,000 words or more. Likewise, some topics only require maybe 500 words. This approach will give you posts that vary in length from one to another.
Your longer posts will be great for getting traffic from Google and the other search engines. You could also publish excerpts of your epic post on other sites, like LinkedIn or Medium, with links back to your main post for additional traffic. Your shorter posts would be great for getting traffic from the other social media sites.
A Related Question: How Often Should You Post?
Like I said at the beginning of this post, if you write short posts then you probably post more often than those who write longer posts. You can publish shorts posts daily or even a few times a day. That would probably be ideal for posts of only a few hundred words or less.
Longer posts take longer to write, so you might only publish once a week. This is ideal for building a readership. It's even better if you can get 2 published in a week when you are just starting out.
I've seen some bloggers who only publish once a month. I don't recommend this if you want to increase your readership or your SEO ranking. I would think that at best this could just maintain your readership.
Your Thoughts
What are your thoughts? How long do you think a blog post should be? Tell me in a comment below. It really comes down to personal preference and what you want to accomplish with your post.
I appreciate you taking the time to read my post, and I would greatly appreciate it if you would take a moment to share this with your followers on social media.
PS. If you are a network marketer (or thinking about becoming one) and want to take your business online, I can help you with that.
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