What is the Ideal Blog Post Length?

"Yes, the articles are great. They really hit the mark on the messaging and content side. And, the topics are right on point as well. Our blog article topics are exactly what the market is asking about. But, I think they are rather long. Can your team shorten them?"

That was a real discussion with a former CEO. This while we were turning around and rebuilding the marketing engine. No question the content the team was generating was high-quality material. But his view was that shorter posts of less than 300 words should hit the sweet spot, for the target audience. Unfortunately, this was a pure guess on the CEO's part.

Turns out that time on site, the importance of substantive content to establish credibility and trust, search rank positions, and other factors; were all positively impacted by IGNORING that anecdotal 'gut feel' on ideal blog post length. Despite the empirical evidence that countered the opinion, this scenario opened a broader question. Is there an ideal blog post length? Is longer content better content? Or, do short posts hit the mark, instead? Is the ideal post 500 words, 1,000 words, 1,500 words, or more? How should I guide my staff to answer these questions?

Most Important

Before discussing your blog content length, prioritize two things. First and most importantly, write content that speaks to your target audience's wants and needs. If you produce long form content when they want short social media photo-centric content; then you are missing the mark. Vice versa is also the case.

Write content that speaks to your target audience's wants and needs.

Second, base your marketing decision on the numbers. Watch Google Analytics carefully. Run tests with longer and shorter form content. Do your regular keyword research, and vary your posts both by keyword combinations and in length. Set out metrics to watch, like time on page, search results volume, search engine rank positions, bounce rates, CTR on native ads, and so on. Then formulate a decision based on proving or disproving your hypothesis about your ideal post length.

Why it's Important?

Why you care about this, is simply that longer content takes longer to write (usually). If you can get away with writing shorter prose that gets just as much attention, awareness, and SEO impact; then gravitate in that direction. In many cases you are driving SEO traffic to your website, to build trust and credibility with your target market. At other times this is important for your demand generation efforts as you try to drive great content exposure to some of your top of the funnel (TOFU) white papers, research, benchmarks, and other such collateral. For a deeper dive on this read: 7 Steps to More Content Exposure.

Marketing Industry Perspective

Scanning articles on this topic, there is consensus focused on SERP (search engine results page) as a key criterion for assessing posts. As such, BlogTyrant found that blog posts averaged 2000-2500 words, in order to rank in the top 10 SERP positions (see chart below).

Huspot's 2021 analysis of their 2019 posts showed supportive results for the chart above. "For SEO, the ideal blog post length should be 2,100-2,400 words, according to HubSpot data. We averaged the length of our 50 most-read blog posts in 2019, which yielded an average word count of 2,330. Individual blog post lengths ranged from 333 to 5,581 words, with a median length of 2,164 words."

Despite this empirical observation, Hubspot also noted immediately after this statement, that not all posts need to be 'super long'. They found that 16 of the 50 most-read blog posts were under 1,500 words.

Changes over Time

Research by OrbitMedia showed to fascinating trends regarding shorter posts and long articles. On the graph below OrbitMedia's research showed the average blog post growing from 808 words in 2014, to 1,269 words in 2020. That is up 57% in 2020 compared to 2014.

An even more interesting part of the research shows that from 2014 - 2020 blog posts at or below 1,000 words have been declining steadily. The most consistent growth is that of 1,000 - 1,500 word blog content. Generalizing, posts of greater than 1,000 words have been steadily rising, as shown it the chart below.

So, unlike the former CEO's intuition about shorter posts being better, this hypothesis should be very carefully tested. The right thing to do for your audience isn't to assume that Hubspot, Orbitmedia, or any other source is right for your target market. Test out a few short posts, and do the same for longer ones. Then, based on data (empirical results), draw your conclusions for the norm for your company.

What is YOUR Ideal Blog Post Length?

Okay, besides the trial and error method, is there another option? All the background context is great to better understand the dynamics and limits of your own efforts. For the tactical details, gauge your ideal blog post length on a case-by-case basis, using some clever tools.

In practice, you will select keyword combinations for which you want to rank on SERP (Google, Bing, ...). Then use a content writing tool to guide your post. There are several such tools on the market. For an in-depth tactical approach to using the SEMRush tool to help with writing and content generation read: SEO Writing Strategy, Tips & Techniques.

My personal favorite is SEMRush's SEO Content Template tool (see image below). SEMRush was among the first companies to integrate the SEO Content Template directly into their competitive, and digital marketing analysis suite. Since it was part of SEMRush, I started tinkering with it, and it grew on me.

Above is the quick analysis tool provided for this article. I used the SEO keywords "blog post length" and asked it to run an analysis. SEMRush reviewed Google's top 10 articles that ranked for this keyword combination. Aside from providing a number of semantically related keywords that the top ten articles on SERP often included, it also provided readability, and text length suggestions.

For this specific post, the tool averaged the top 10 Google posts for my keyword combination, and recommended a text length of 1,145 words for this article (circled in red).

From the experience of using this across several hundred posts, anecdotally, most text length suggestions have ranged in the 640 - 1,800 word lengths. On rare occasions, the recommendation has suggested 2,500 - 3,000 word lengths. But, that is merely an anecdotal observation for my specific writing topics, and keyword combinations.

Is there an Ideal Blog Post Length?

Truthfully, there isn't an ideal blog post length that you must always follow. As shown above, the typical well ranking post lengths will vary over time. It is important to keep an eye on this, as a rule of thumb. However, your best option is to leverage a tool like SEMRush. It provides you with a text length recommendation, based on the keyword combinations for which you wish to rank.

Ultimately, it comes down to what is important to your customer.

As for the 'gut-feel' opinions you may occasionally encounter: counteract these discussions with empirical evidence. Ultimately, it comes down to what is important to your customer. If they want to read long form content of 2,000 words or more - then give it to them! Conversely, if they want it 'short and sweet' then make it brief and punchy! Watch your analytics to see if these are resonating, whatever your choice. Formulate a hypothesis, but be open and willing to adjust your opinion based on the hard, data focused evidence - regardless of whether it supports you initial assumptions or not. Then, continually test your assumptions and hypotheses.

BTW: This post came out to 1,217 words against the recommended 1,145 ;-)

ALSO NOTE: that this is NOT a paid endorsement for SEMRush. I truly like the tool, and use it regularly.