You struggled to pull enough words on the topic out of your derrière and when you got the paper back, all those “verys” and “reallys” you used to boost the word count were redlined.
Writing a blog post can feel much the same. You want to include enough information that your readers are satisfied, but not so much that they get bored. And of course, you want enough content that the search engines will find you and drive your audience to your site in the first place.
Finding that sweet spot in the best blog length can be tough, but what’s most important is providing valuable content that humans will read. That tells the search engines that it’s important information provided by an authoritative source.
[bctt tweet=”Blog length: You must provide valuable content that humans will read. Finding the sweet spot is tough.”]
Beyond that, opinions vary widely on what the ideal blog post length is.
Various online content gurus and organizations have pored through research to find out where that sweet spot is, and no one seems to agree. Here are some of the findings:
- Buffer (a social management company) found it to be a staggering 1,600 words, or about 7 minutes of reading.
- Yoast, an organization that optimizes websites, says anything over about 700 words might scare away readers.
- Moz, an SEO consulting company, found that the longer the posts were, the more traffic it received.
My best advice for the best blog length, which is shared by CoSchedule, is what I used to tell my students when I was a classroom teacher. “Write until you’re done telling your reader what you want to tell them.” There’s no sense in babbling on once you’ve run out of things to say, because you’ll only turn off your reader.
[bctt tweet=”Blog Length: Write until you’re done telling your reader what you want to tell them.”]
The end game is this: quality content. That’s what your audience wants to read. When you’ve told your story and have nothing valuable to add on the topic, stop. Whether that’s at 250 words or 2,000 words. If it’s quality, people will read it and the search engines will find it.
