Blogs are essential for earning trust. By demonstrating your proficiency, experience, and personality, users are more likely to rely on you in the future and purchase your goods and services. But to get the most value from blogs, they must be appropriate for your audience, which requires you to adopt the correct tone, format, and length.
To that end, is there an optimal blog length? A post that’s too short may make the user feel they didn’t get all the information they wanted. However, an overly long blog can be boring or obscure the essential information with unhelpful padding.
Having a blog that’s the wrong length in either direction will also directly and negatively impact SEO. As a result, the blogs that were meant to connect with users are now buried in search rankings.
Determining The Correct Word Count
The prevailing advice is to keep blog word counts between 1,500 and 2,500. One reason is that these longer blogs leave plenty of room for high-ranking keywords, and 2,000 words are generally enough to satisfy a reader’s requirements. However, the answer to the question of blog word count is not so simple. Some content requires longer or shorter word lengths.
300 Words for Product Descriptions and Prompts
Content with fewer than 300 words should be reserved for product descriptions. In these pieces, images and videos will do the heavy lifting, with the words simply providing prompts for generating discussion.
500 Words for News Releases and Announcements
At around 500 words, copy will be most effective if it’s announcing an event or product release or if it’s informing the media about an important topic such as a disaster, high-profile leadership change, or other newsworthy information.
700 Words for Articles and Encyclopedia Entries
Newspaper articles and encyclopedia entries are usually in the 700-word range. This is also the length that can begin to generate backlinks.
1,300+ Words for Informational Blogs
At this length, you’ll find informational blogs designed to educate. These aren’t how-to guides or instructional blogs, however. Those are generally longer.
1,500 to 2,500 Words for Listicles and Guides
This is the optimal range for blogs and will be what tends to rank highly in search results. These are the articles that get the most shares and search traffic. The formats that do best are listicles and instructional guides since they are comprehensive yet easy to reference, thanks to numbered sections with bullet points.
3,000+ Words for Pillar Pages
Pillar pages are perhaps not as adept at generating top search rankings as shorter blogs. Nonetheless, they are essential for establishing authority or delving deeply into a subject.
Questions to Ask Before Writing
Before you set out with a goal for a specific word count, start by asking some essential questions about the nature of your content:
- Who is your audience?
- What is the goal of the content?
- What is the length of competing blogs?
Often, you will shape the length of your blog around the answers to these questions. Content as short as 500 words or as long as 5,000 has its place. Start by engaging in proper SEO and serving your users with quality content. You can worry about blog length afterward.
Trust Experts to Craft Your Blogs
Refining blog content is an art in and of itself. At Net Profit Marketing, we’ve honed our skills and learned how to create effective content. When you’re ready to bring your blogging to the next level, we’re ready to talk.
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