What is the ideal length for a blog post
Writing a blog is the perfect way to share your ideas with the world, to show your expertise, and to express your feelings. But how long should the perfect blog be?
Is there an ideal word count for search engines and for keeping your reader's attention?
Longer blog posts tend to perform better than shorter ones in search results, but should you turn every post into a novel?
I did some research, and the conclusion might surprise you: there is no fixed number for an article to be considered perfect. And if there were a number, it would depend on what you are writing about.
What can be considered as the perfect word length?
To be honest, this is no exact science, and there is not a specific and clear answer.
Some major websites in the blogging world researched their own data, and these are the results:
According to these numbers, the sweet spot seems to be around 1500 words for an article to perform well in search engine results.
But is this also true for your reader's experience? Or do they want a shorter or longer article? Should I only write blog posts with a length of around 1400 words?
I go deeper into this and explain why short posts are sometimes much better than lengthy ones.
Why are long posts performing better in search results?
The longer your content is, the more hints you give to search engines what your blog post is about.
A search engine's task is to offer the best possible answer to a user's search query. Most of the time, Google sees a long article more suitable as an answer. Shorter articles are seen as 'thin content' and do not offer enough value to the user.
In a longer post, it is easier for you to provide a complete answer to your readers' search query and offer them even more than they asked for. This will lead to a longer time on your page, which is also a ranking factor for Google's algorithm, the 'time on page'. If someone spends lots of time on your post, Google thinks it must be valuable content, so it will rank you higher.
And, longer blog posts are more likely to be shared on social media, which is also a ranking factor for Google's algorithm.
You get the point, it is all about telling the search engines what you are writing about. In long posts, you can give answers to various questions and write about more keywords.
You can compare it to fishing; the more fishing rods you have in a lake, the more chance you have of a fish biting. So, the more topics (or keywords) you handle in a post, the more chance you have to rank high.
Should I always write long blog posts?
You might think all your blog posts should be around 1400 words or more. But it's not, it all depends on the search intent.
Let's say you want to write an article about 'How to open an incognito tab' or 'When is Christmas'. Both can be answered in a few lines; search engines are smart enough to know if you write 1500 words for this search query, that these are all irrelevant words and are not helping the reader any further.
That is why you normally have your content into two buckets:
Pillar posts
You can think of this as a resource post which contains between 2000 to 4000 words. A pillar post is a comprehensive resource that answers a broad
It is a resource that people will come back to over and over again.
The number of pillar posts in your blog should be around 25%, and the rest of your content should be supporting or informational posts.
Informational posts
Supporting or informational posts are shorter than pillar posts and much easier to write. There is no fixed length for these posts as long as they sufficiently answer the user's question.
Whereas pillar posts cover a wide variety of things, an informational post only handles one specific answer.
Topical authority is built upon the pillar posts. In these, we show the search engines we know a lot about the topic we are writing about.
As all informational posts link to the pillar post, Google or other search engines will know this pillar post must be important and valuable because of all the links pointing to it.
Summary
It is all about letting search engines know how knowledgeable and authoritative you are. You do this by writing pillar and informational posts.
Pillar posts should have +1500 words as they cover more topics, and the supporting articles should be between 1000 and 1500 words.
If you want to make money with blogging (see Passive income with blogging), you need to get noticed and get traffic. You need to let the search engines know your content is valuable and worth presenting as an answer
Search engines are becoming smarter and smarter, but it is always good to give them a structure and make it easy for them to understand what your blog is all about. And the better they understand it, the higher you will be ranked.
