What Should The Length Of My Blog Be?

It’s pretty obvious that the reason why you’re asking this question is because you want to know the number of words you need to have in your blog to rank highly in online search engines like Google which dominates the market in search engines.

If you typed the Google search keywords: “how long should your blog post be”, the top article would be from wix.com where Google even showed a snippet from the article stating this:

between 1,500 - 2,500 words

“After in-depth industry research and analyzing our very own results from the Wix Blog, we've found that the ideal blog post length is between 1,500 - 2,500 words, with a sweet spot right at 2,450.”

It’s very clear that Google supports what the Wix article contains regarding the ideal blog length. But is this truly the answer or just a guideline from Google because the other articles which follows the top ranking Wix article gives out a much different number or information.

HubSpot, the famous American developer and marketer of software products for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service recommends that for SEO, the ideal blog post length should be between 2,100 to 2,400 words. This conflicts with the Wix results right?

Meanwhile, other articles state that all you need is a minimum of 300 words to rank in Google’s search results. But they do state a caveat to this extremely low word count: longer worded blog posts would tend to rank higher than shorter worded blog posts.

In essence, this is what all the articles online state: your blog need only to be a minimum of about 300 words to rank but the longer your articles are, the more likely it is to rank higher in Google’s search results.

And I can attest that this simple answer is true through observation, I’m online almost 16 hours a day and using search engines for hours several times a day. I can attest that there are instances where very short blog content outranks much longer blog posts.

One interesting article to read is from the website Blog Tyrant and is titled: - How Long Should A Blog Post Be? Ideal Length For 2022. The article stated that the ideal blog article length should be about 1,600 words.

According to their research, overall, 74% of blog posts that are read are under 3 minutes long and 94% are under 6 minutes long. This means that blog readers overall have a very short attention span of less than 3 minutes.

Frankly, from my experience, my blogs are read between 4 to over 6 minutes on average but I have also seen instances where my blogs are read in less than 3 minutes on average. So I can say that the figures stated by the article has some truth to it.

But what is true is that the attention span of readers and even video watchers are getting shorter and shorter and although longer blog posts would tend to rank higher initially, the more shorter but more reader popular ones would eventually overtake them.

This is because the more a blog is read, the more it succeeds in gaining trust points with search engines. In social media terms, we could call these blogs as ”Trending” The more a digital content trends, the more it is shown prominently online.

Though longer blog posts tend to rank much higher in online search results as compared to shorter ones, their SEO value is questionable. This is because many SEO experts have determined that Google’s algorithm have improved vastly.

This means that bloggers who want to game/trick Google’s algorithm by writing longer and longer blog posts but with lesser and lesser quality would be found out much better by Google and punished/disciplined accordingly.

This is because Google knows that for the most part, you don’t really need a long article to explain or answer a simple question or query. Google knows that there are many online content creators out there who are only interested in getting as much ad revenue as they can.

They know that these online creators would commit all the dirty tricks in their arsenal just to rank in search engine results which most entirely will be Google. This is what Google continuously considers when improving their search engine algorithm.

This is the reason we see shorter blog content outranking longer blog content in some instances. This is because the shorter blog have much more quality content than the longer blogs.

The answer to this question is a resounding: “NO” and I can give three proofs: Google Snippets, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok. Do I still need to explain why I mentioned these three online content phenomenon?

YouTube Shorts and TikTok have proven just how short the attention span is of the average person today. These short content video formats have proven that you can make online money with videos that are just mere seconds long.

Google Snippets meanwhile have proven that you don’t really need to read an entire page of a website to get the answer that you are looking for. All that is needed at most is a short paragraph from Google answering the question/query.

Also, since people have short attention spans these days which borders to a few seconds to a few minutes, creating very long content just to further capture a consumer’s attention would most likely be futile.

It might even be better to create a few shorter length online content as compared to creating one long online content because the monetization factor would likely be much higher in the former.

The answer is this: There is no safe range in terms of the number of words a blog should have. But after reading and watching so many so-called blogging experts online, I would state what they generally advise:

Your blog length should at least be 1,000 words. This is because studies have found out that an average person reads over 300 words a minute and the average person on average spends three minutes at most to read anything.

This means that on average, an article should be about 900 words in length to be read before the reader loses interest and stops reading the article. From my own experience, I regularly write blog posts that are about 1000 to 1300 words in length.

Above this number, I know that I am more than likely to add fluff already in my article like unneeded information or extra information that is better suited to be another article by itself. But I’m not alone. Other so-called professional bloggers online would state the same.

But this does not mean that long form blogs are not profitable already. There are blog questions/queries that don’t really need a lot of words to be answered/explained, but there are those that really need almost a book sized article just to be clearly answered/explained.

But we all know that fewer and fewer people are reading books today and as previously explained the for the better part, you have mere seconds or just a few minutes tops to attract your reader/watcher’s attention.

But you might say: “Then long format online content is dead and is hardly monetizable anymore!” My answer is to don’t panic. Long format is not yet dead, it’s just taking on another form in the form of suggested links.



Suggested links? Yes, remember that blogs and other website content now mostly have a buttons or links to allow a reader/watcher to access further content which might be related or totally unrelated to the online content they just read/viewed.

In a way, blogs and other online content are now never ending. This is vastly different from just reading a printed newspaper or book, both of which you dispose after reading. Online content has autoplay features which continuously displays online content unless it is stopped.

To repeat, anything above 1,000 words is a good word length/volume for a blog, but the longer a blog is, the higher is its chance of ranking higher in search results. This is not true always, there are shorter blog posts which consistently outrank much longer blog posts.

You should consider if you would create several shorter online content as against creating one very long online content. This is because the sum of the shorter ones in terms of monetization might be much higher than the longer one.

You might also like to read the article:

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