Recently, one of our clients asked about the optimal length for her blog post. After giving her the ever-so-common (and accurate) “it depends” answer, we promised to do some digging to give her better advice. We quickly learned that there are many opinions on the answer to this question (no surprise) as it depends on how you value, collect, and interpret the data. Here’s a brief summary of what we found:

• According to Mike Sall, previously Head of Data Science at Medium, who focused on attention of a post, not clicks, the answer is seven minutes. This translates roughly to about 1,600 words. READ MORE >>
• Marieke van de Rakt, the CEO of Yoast, recommended that at a minimum, your post should always contain more than 300 words. If not, it may not rank in search engines. Ideally, she recommends your post should be between 700-1,000 words, unless you’re a very strong writer. READ MORE >>
• One SerpIQ study concluded that for most SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), it looks like at least 1500 words is a good target. READ MORE >>
• Backlinko, interestingly, had another take. According to an April 2020 article, “Pages with higher word count appear to have the same chance of ranking highly on the first page compared to pages with a lower word count. The mean word count of a Google first page result is 1,447 words.” However, the article also states that “…despite the fact that long-form content tends to be best for link building, we found no direct relationship between word count and rankings.” READ MORE >>

So what answer do we give our clients? It depends.

Instead of focusing first on length, always focus on quality over quantity. After developing your initial draft, spend time refining and enhancing it to make it more concise and powerful. A much shorter post that contains valuable content, is easier and quicker to read, and is jam-packed with relevant keywords is much more likely to be read than an article filled with fluff or unnecessary content.

Given the information we found, we generally recommend writing posts that are around 1,500 words. As a point of reference, this post contains about 400 words. But don’t let this guideline dictate the length of all your posts. A longer post or article is okay if the subject matter warrants it. And a shorter one is okay if it doesn’t.

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Have a question for us? Send it to letstalk@vizual.com and we’ll do our best to answer.