What is the ideal length for a blog post? - Decision Tree

Whether you are a writer or a marketer, you may have often wondered about the ideal length of a blog post.

500, 1000, 2000, or 2300?

You’d have heard plenty of answers from different people. But the truth behind the matter is that there’s no ideal length for a blog post. Eventually, it all boils down to the number of words you need to explain a topic or get your message across.

The shorter, the better?

Well, again, the answer to that could be a yes or no, depending on the type of content and topic you are writing on.

In our experience, it is always better to focus on what’s essential in your writing than concentrating on the word count or the length of the article. Your writing style, format, relevancy, and substance – these are the factors that will eventually hook and engage your readers. So, whether you write 500 or 5000 words, if the content is irrelevant or even poorly formatted, it is neither going to be appreciated by search engines nor by your readers.

Cutting a long story short – it is all about striking the right balance.

According to HubSpot, longer blogs do tend to perform better on search engines. HubSpot’s data also indicates that the ideal blog post length should be about 2,100 to 2,400 words.

The reason is that when you write longer text, search engines get more context into what your content is about. Besides, if your content is relevant, it is natural that your focused keywords will appear more frequently, adding to the post’s success. More words mean you can also add synonyms and contextual keywords, making it easier for users to find your content. However, that does not mean shorter blogs cannot perform well. All you have to do is write meaningful content and make use of some SEO best practices like:

• Use H1, H2, H3..so on…to format the article properly
• Include an adequate number of images and headings to make the content scannable
• Backlink to quality websites and cross-link with internal content to boost website traffic
• Add alt-text
• Try to use media-rich content in the body of your post, like videos and social media posts

The length of your blog also depends on its purpose. If you aim to generate comments or open a discussion, short blogs under 300 words could very well serve the purpose. Without doling out too much information, such blogs can be written in a thought-provoking style, urging users to share their opinions.

On the other hand, if you are writing a pillar post, you may end up writing as many as 4000 words. That’s because pillar posts are a result of intensive research and typically cite several sources. A pillar post aims to establish domain authority and link out to all your related posts on the matter. Thus, it is only prudent that you write as much as it takes to get your point across, and it is likely to pay off by sending more organic traffic to your pillar post and its supporting content.

So, what would you choose?

Your users’ interests – that’s what we’d say. Yes, in times of shrinking attention spans, the ideal length for a blog post is just as much as it takes to share actionable information. Anything extra or fluffy content will only make your readers wrinkle their noses in distaste for wasting their precious time.

Furthermore, you can also analyse the posts written by you in the past and compare their performance to understand the length that works best for your users. This will give you a fair estimate of the length preferred by your users, and the remaining will depend on your topic and the level of research involved.