Just how long should a blog post be? It’s one of those questions that I honestly get asked all the time–both from a reading perspective as well as an SEO perspective.  In this article we’re going to talk a little more about writing blog posts, how long a blog post should be, and how to optimize a blog post for both your readers as well as search engines.

First off let’s start by saying that I never suggest writing blog posts for search engines or SEO.  Some people write articles that make absolutely no sense at all to a human reader, but they probably make a lot of sense to search engines because every other word is one of their keywords they are trying to rank for.  Just don’t do it–you will diminish the value of your blog, lose your readers, and honestly it won’t help much at all with SEO anymore–Google has some pretty darn good spam filters these days.

How Long Should A Blog Post Be?

Well it depends.  What are you trying to do with that blog post?  Tell a story?  Explain how to do something?  Give instructions?  Vent how bad of a day you’re having?  Share a time and location for an upcoming event?  There’s millions of reasons why people post to blogs, and each reason has a different answer for how long the blog post should be.

Short Blog Posts: I rarely write short blog posts, but when I do they are typically between 150 and 300 words.  These are usually reserved for simply making announcements or posting an event.  These types of blog posts usually obviously can’t convey much information. As far as SEO goes, it’s our opinion that shorter blog posts aren’t as popular on search engines simply because search engines are looking for a good amount of content.

Medium Blog Posts: These are the majority of our blog posts and usually range between 400 and 750 words.  These blog posts are long enough to convey a good amount of information about a topic and are well liked by search engines.  I’ve also found that these types and lengths of blog posts often do well on social media and are more likely to go viral than other lengths.

Long Blog Posts: These are used by us from time to time to convey a good amount of information about a topic and usually are reserved for topics that obviously require a more in depth or step by step explanation.  These blog posts are typically between 750 words at 1,250 words–it’s really rare for us to ever post more than 1,250 words in a blog post– and typically these posts also do quite well naturally ranking in search results.

How Long Should A Blog Post Be For SEO Purposes?

It doesn’t matter. I know many of you “internet marketing gurus” don’t like this answer because you think that a blog post should be 442.323 words exactly but there is no formula.  Think about it this way, if every single post you wrote was 450 words, wouldn’t that raise some suspicious over at Google?  I bet it would.  Vary it up–search engines LOVE good content, but there is no limit to the length of that content.  I personally suggest staying around 400 words on average, but of course from time to time you are going to have 200 and 800 and 1,500 word blog posts.  It’s all natural, and honestly these days if your website looks natural to search engines and looks of high quality that’s is a huge plus right off the bat.

Overall when writing blog posts don’t be afraid to mix up the length of your posts–the more important thing is to have regular posts so you can develop a following and have you readers looking forward to the next post you publish.