How Long Should Your Blog Articles Be? (With Word Counts for Every Industry)

Word count.

It’s a topic that receives a lot of coverage these days.

Bloggers and content marketers are always wondering what’s the ideal word count to shoot for.

Should every single piece be long form, or is it better to opt for shorter pieces?

It’s a valid question and something that I have researched extensively.

The purpose of this post is to shed light on just how long your blog articles should be.

There’s one thing I always want to make clear regarding word count.

It only matters if the content is good.

Word count is not a standalone ranking factor. Word count only has merit if the content quality is high!

You can produce a 10,000-word article. But if the content and quality suck, then the article doesn’t deserve to get ranked. You lose.

Is word count important?

Yes, it is, and that’s why I write about it often.

But word count is only important when coupled with super high quality.

I work with clients in virtually every vertical. Whenever I enter a new industry, my team and I conduct thorough research to find out everything we can about top-notch content within that industry.

Then, we begin to engage in content marketing while constantly looking at our data. We track engagement metrics, rankings, CTRs, social shares, etc.

After a while, a story emerges from the data. We are able to find out what kind of content ranks the best, and how long they should be.

I’m basing the following word counts off of that research and experience.

Allow me to begin with a brief history of the word count all the way up to where it’s at today.

The evolution of the ideal word count

I remember when not that long ago the average blog post was usually somewhere between 500 and 800 words.

Sometimes even shorter.

Take for instance Seth Godin’s blog.

He’s known for extremely short posts that are often under 200 words.

And he gets crazy shares because, well, he’s Seth Godin.

But this definitely isn’t the norm.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of years, you know that long-form content reigns supreme.

There have been several studies performed that prove this to be true.

Take for instance one study that analyzed articles to determine the correlation between social shares and content length.

Here’s what they found.

According to their findings, “3,000 – 10,000-word content gets the most shares.”

Another study from SerpIQ concurred.

However, their findings were a bit different and found that just over 2,450 words was the sweet spot.

[Click to continue reading...]