Ideal Blog Post Length

The quality of your blog posts will always be more important than the length, and the ideal length varies from topic to topic.  However, if you’re looking for a concrete standard we would say the ideal blog post length is 500 words +/- 200. Size does matter:  the average person that comes across your content via search engines doesn’t have time to read thousands of words and is looking for answers. Here are some guidelines for finding the ideal length for your content:

300 Words

Your blog posts should be at least 300 words for SEO purposes.  500 words is commonly said to be the ideal length as it is long enough to build a story around a topic but not too long for readers to digest.  If you only have one or two short points to make consider tweeting them or creating a fun visual and pinning it on Pinterest.

Avoid Redundancy

No matter what length your blog posts end up being, it had better not be repetitive.  Only use the words and examples that are necessary to get your point across, overdo it and your readers will likely lose interest.

Watch Out for Wordiness

A great way to trim the length of your blog posts is to delete and rearrange wordy sentences. No one wants to read an extemporaneous article. Decreasing wordiness will help you achieve greater content clarity.

Break it Up

If your blog post on a particular topic is going to be long (greater than 1000 words), consider breaking it up into a series of posts.  This makes the information easier to digest and also builds anticipation if you don’t release them all at once.  In addition, search engines will rank you more favorably if you publish shorter posts more often rather than longer posts less frequently. For example, if you were writing about the very broad topic of  ‘How to Use Social Media’, it would be best to break it up into a series of posts covering different social networks or aspects of social media use.

Quality Over Quantity

As we stated at the beginning of this article, quality is key.  If someone arrives at your blog looking for information and come across a poorly written post it won’t matter how long or short it is, they won’t be satisfied and will be unlikely to return. When in doubt, act in the favor of putting forth quality content over length or frequency.

FYI this post is 414 words.

Thanks for reading!

Cah{o,o}ts

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