So, you have found the perfect topic you want to talk about- but the question remains… how often do you post and how long should these posts be?
There are many posts out there advising on ideal length of blogs for SEO purpose. Some say things like “blogs over 1000 words rank better”.
Ideal Blog Length
The truth is the perfect blog post length and publishing frequency doesn’t technically exist.
Every content writer’s definition of perfect is going to be different, and their versions of success will depend on different personalised factors. There are different things you should be looking for when it comes to successfully publishing blog posts, and we have the answers for you.
Let’s be real, the first thing people do when they are wanting to start a blog on a particular topic is Google existing blogs on that topic, to get some background information. Once they have that, they would dig further and find out what the ideal blog post lengths are and what ideal publishing frequencies are for any kind of blog posts.
Searching this information on Google will give you basic and generic statistics like “blogs should be around 2,350 and 2,434 words in total”. Not only are you contending with that hectic information, but also that fact that the average length of content comes across in a 5,000 keyword set.
The key piece of information to remember here is statistics are wrong- and you need to focus on asking yourself more important questions before deciding how long your blog posts should be. Anytime you have basic statistics outlining how long your blog post should be you should ask yourself questions like:
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Do the keywords I am targeting in my blog have the same or very similar results?
If you were to take a sample of around about fifty keywords that you cared significantly about and you were to get the average content length of the top ten results, would it resemble it? Or would it not resemble it at all?
The next question in correlation to this issue is determining how big the delta is. This is important because some keywords require a great deal of content to answer them fully, while other keywords require little to almost no amounts of content. Has Google then prioritised the keywords accordingly?
Once you have taken all of this into consideration you then take the final approach is it wise, to aim for the average amount of words when a larger, more detailed article would be much more appreciated and be much more likely to succeed? Or will a much shorter one that is precise and to the point do the trick you are aiming for? You should not be “aiming” for the average if you do not need to be the average.
What set of keywords does the average apply to?
When you think about 5,000 keywords, your heart might just sink. It is such a big, broad set of words that could potentially mean anything right? Some of these keywords are going to be navigational, some are going to transactional, some are informational and why don’t we throw in a few ecommerce keywords, just a dash of travel related keywords and a pinch or random ones.
All that just sounds completely meaningless doesn’t it? Especially if the standard deviation is quite high. The information is especially not helpful if things that did rank number one were somewhere between 500 and 15,000 words. So basically, the average tells you nothing. It is misleading information that just makes you really confused when it comes to writing your own blog. When it comes down to it, know what keywords are going to get you the hits and start from there.
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Instead of trusting averages you should:
Be willing to be different
Notice what others are doing, take that into consideration, but maybe do something different. See that others doing the same as you have written 2,000 words, but you believe it can be done with shorter content and believes searchers will appreciate it? well then go for it! Read: How to create content for your customers.
Match your goals and your content goals with searcher goals
If you are trying to help someone solve a very specific problem, and it is a very easily answerable question and you’re trying to get the featured snippet, you don’t want to bore them with a thousand words. Similar, if you are solving a complex and difficult question and have a great deal of information and resources on the issue that no one else knows about, you may need to go into great detail.
Craft posts that actually earn attention
It is far better if post once and get fifty new visitors to your site who then turned into five new paying customers, rather than someone who published eleven posts and got one new paying customer. It is all about spending the time crafting that perfect post.
