How long does a blog post need to be?

People often ask me, “how long does a blog post need to be?” so I thought I would share a few ideas with you.

If you want a post to be highly search engine optimized, then you will notice that there is a lot of conflicting information.  Typically, it seems SEO experts are saying you should shoot for between 300 / 500 words as a minimum.  However, on Jim’s marketing blog, I very often write posts that are apparently too short for SEO, yet the site gets a great deal of targeted traffic from Google.  This post is just around 70 words plus the title.

So, how long should a blog post be?

Here are a few ideas, based on some very successful bloggers and the approach they use.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg often writes posts that are just a sentence or 2 and some are just a few words and a link.  Marketing author and Squidoo founder Seth Godin, often writes posts on his blog, which are little longer than tweets, with other posts running to over 800/1000 words.  Other’s blog using photos, with almost no text and some use video.  My friend, the author and branding / social media expert Olivier Blanchard, writes excellent, detailed posts that are often a couple of thousand words long.

Each of those approaches are correct!

Blog post length and your desired outcome

Maybe a better question than “how long should a blog post be” is to ask how long a blog post should be, for your particular desired outcome?  If you want to share short, information rich posts, then stick with the short format and focus on regularly updating your site.  This is what many short post format sites do and it works extremely well.  Short posts on infrequently updated sites get far less search traffic, as I found out for myself with my demo site.

If you are looking for posts that will score well for relevant key phrases, I believe it makes sense to shoot for longer, information rich posts; 400 words plus.

Of course NONE of this matters, if the content is not high quality.  Content volume is far, far less important than content value.  High value content attracts links, shares and subscribers.  It draws people, creates conversions and makes things happen!

The bottom line:  With even SEO experts in disagreement regarding the ideal post length, I suggest testing and measuring; based on what you want to achieve.

How long do you think posts should be?  What kind of results have you seen, with either longer or shorter format posts? I’d love to see your feedback!

Photo: jenorton