Blogging can bring many benefits to your business. It’s an opportunity to share your expertise, boost your search engine results, and help your audience get to know you before they do business with you.
But what’s the criteria for a good blog, and how long should it be? Well, it’s all up to you and what your organization is trying to accomplish through blogging. As with most things in marketing, determining the length of your blog posts comes back to first understanding your goals for blogging in the first place.
What’s the purpose of your blog?
Organizations blog for many different reasons – to improve their search engine optimization (SEO), showcase their expertise, provide helpful information to their customers, and give people an opportunity to learn more about their company before becoming a customer or client. Have you identified your primary purpose for blogging?
How much time (or budget) do you have?
Writing blog content, especially longer-form blog content, takes time and energy. Or, if you choose to outsource blog writing, it requires budget. The time and/or budget you have for blogging plays a role in how long your blogs can be.
Who is your audience?
Knowing your audience can also impact the length of your blog posts. If you’re trying to reach busy executives who don’t have a lot of time and your primary purpose for blogging is educating your audience, then shorter content with lots of subheads is likely the way to go. Longer form content might perform better for SEO rankings, but if the content is too long for your audience to read, it may not accomplish your primary goal.
What’s an ideal word count?
The word count on your blogs is going to vary based on all the factors above, but here are some things to keep in mind. Blogs that are less than 300 words will likely get ignored by search engines entirely. Longer-form content around 1,000 words will likely perform better for SEO purposes alone. Blogs that are around 500 to 750 words may strike a good balance between readability for your audience and SEO.
As you’re evaluating the length of your blogs, keep readability in mind – you don’t want the information to sound redundant or like you stuffed a bunch of extra words into the post to meet a specific word count. In fact, if you do that, you might even get penalized by the search engines.
There’s no magic answer when it comes to how long your blog posts should be, since your goals, your time (or budget, and your audience all factor into what’s right for your business. Try some different options and evaluate what works best for your business!
Do you need help implementing a blogging strategy for your business? Get in touch with the StoryPath Communications team for more information about our blogging services.