What is the average blog post length?

Over my years in digital marketing and SEO, I’ve seen a lot of “studies” about how long the average blog post is. Some of these are better than others, but I haven’t seen an updated one for 2022 so I decided I’d do my own study and publish the results here for you.

I decided to do mine a bit differently. Instead of just going and finding a bunch of random blog posts, I decided to ask my Twitter audience to send me their sites. I also went to some sites I read fairly often, such as TechCrunch or Search Engine Land, and grabbed some of their blog posts.

Below you will find my findings for average (and median) blog post length across the 509 articles we crawled, some other interesting findings (that SEOs and content marketers especially will find interesting), full methodology, and then thanks to all of the people who submitted their website that I was able to crawl (there were a few that I was not).

Findings

The average blog post is now 1,696.8 words long, which is a 48% increase from 2018 when?this study ?was published. The median blog post length is now 1,370 words.

We’ve known for years that longer content tends to rank better than shorter content and that longer content converts better as well. There are absolutely instances of shorter content ranking well and satisfying the user’s query, but in my opinion, those are exceptions that prove the rule.

If you want to rank well your content needs to be sufficiently long enough to satisfy the topic and help the user accomplish their goal of learning or finding the thing they want to learn or find.

Other interesting findings

Because I’m an SEO at heart, I had some other questions about these blog posts that I spent the bandwidth to crawl.

Here are some interesting statistics that you may find interesting as well:

1. The average <title> length is 63.78 characters, and the average <title> pixel width is 594.74 pixels. Median for each is 62 and 582 respectively.
2. The average meta description length is 125.03 character, and the average meta description pixel width is 797.37 pixels. Median for each is 129 and 828 respectively.
3. 92.93% of blog posts crawled do not have meta keywords in their code. This means 7.07% crawled do still have meta keywords.
4. The average H1 length is 49.25 characters. The media H1 length is 49 characters. All blog posts in our dataset have an H1 on the page.
5. The average H2 length is 30.56 characters. The media H2 length is 26 characters. 8.64% of blog posts in our dataset do not have an H2.
6. The average length of a second H2 is 30.56 characters. The median length of a second H2 is 26 characters. 17.88% of blog posts in our dataset do not have a second H2.
7. The average blog post has 8 inlinks, 74 outlinks (internal and external), and 16 external outlinks.
8. The average blog post also has 21.74 spelling errors and 21.24 grammar errors.
9. 2.47% of blog posts that were linked internally on blog index pages redirected or were canonicalised to another page.

Methodology

First, I sourced a bunch of sites from my Twitter followers and some of the content sites that I frequent fairly often. I did this because I wanted to get a diverse set of blog posts so that my numbers would be as accurate as possible.

I then used a Chrome extension to “scrape” 10-20 posts from each site.

I put them into a Google Sheet and de-duplicated (just one site had them duplicated).

Then I took the list and manually pasted them into Screaming Frog to crawl the list.

Screaming Frog crawled them.

I then exported the list to a CSV and imported into Google Drive, then turned that into a Google Sheet.

From there, I manipulated the data to pull the statistics presented above.

Thanks to all of these folks

I want to thank all of the folks who submitted their site as well. Here’s the list:

• https://searchengineland.com/
• https://moz.com/
• https://ipullrank.com/
• https://seoarcade.com/
• https://www.growthmentor.com/
• https://news.outdoortechnology.com/
• https://www.johnfdoherty.com/
• https://beantownmv.com/
• https://www.veracityagency.com/
• https://chrislema.com/
• https://meetharlow.com/
• https://editorninja.com/
• https://www.tacoandbean.com/
• https://optinmonster.com/
• https://www.proposify.com/
• https://designpickle.com/
• https://www.bradhussey.ca/
• https://outofofficeentrepreneur.com/
• https://fieryfx.com/
• https://savvyrevenue.com/
• https://analyticsindiamag.com/
• https://www.calcalistech.com/
• https://www.business-standard.com/
• https://www.toprankblog.com/
• https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/
• https://redcanoemedia.com/
• https://searchlabdigital.com/
• https://www.androidheadlines.com/
• https://9to5google.com/
• https://www.business2community.com/
• https://www.oncrawl.com/
• https://www.conductor.com/
• https://yoast.com/
• https://www.vertical-leap.uk/
• https://blog.google/
• https://www.theguardian.com/
• https://sparktoro.com/
• https://www.sistrix.com/
• https://www.reuters.com/
• https://www.theverge.com/
• https://pressgazette.co.uk/
• https://www.mercurynews.com/
• https://blog.ericgoldman.org/
• https://thestreamable.com/
• https://www.computing.co.uk/
• https://appleinsider.com/
• https://www.nytimes.com/
• https://www.france24.com/
• https://techcrunch.com/
• https://adage.com/
• https://www.channelnewsasia.com/
• https://www.hallaminternet.com/
• https://www.businesswire.com/
• https://www.brightedge.com/
• https://ahrefs.com/
• https://zyppy.com/
• https://www.theseosprint.com/
• https://www.rankranger.com/
• https://developers.googleblog.com/
• https://www.rte.ie/
• https://seekingalpha.com/
• https://www.ft.com/
• https://www.wsj.com/
• https://www.localguidesconnect.com/
• https://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/
• https://www.ppchero.com/
• https://about.ads.microsoft.com/
• https://www.adexchanger.com/
• https://www.seerinteractive.com/
• https://www.newslaundry.com/
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/
• https://www.cnbc.com/
• https://www.wired.com/
• https://www.androidpolice.com/
• https://www.kristaseiden.com/
• https://www.outseta.com/
• https://www.geocod.io/
• https://johnvantine.com/

And a massive special shoutout to?Barry Schwartz ?who referred me to his search recaps where I found a very diverse set of posts that undoubtedly made this study more accurate. Thanks Barry!