Is there some sort of word count requirement when blogging?
Most blog articles out there are LONG. And it is more a case of being long for the sake of being long. You can chop off the top 1/3rd or 2/3rds and not lose anything.
Is there a legitimate reason why bloggers make things so long? Or is it a case of many blogs outsourcing to writers who are paid based on word count?
Hubspot argues that:
While Backlinko claims that longer posts outperform shorter ones with
Ahrefs declares that a post should have at least 300 words.
I think word count matters less than it used to. People want to get the information ASAP. Google starts to reward it.
The Hubspot takeaway is interesting.
I know this is not an apple to apple comparison, but recently I was working on my homepage, and I did a quick analysis of homepage word counts. I took the top 10 players based on IH striped confirmed revenue.
One outlier had like 50k words, but that was because it was a job listing site. Otherwise, most sites had 500-1000 words on their homepage. Only one had more than 2000 words. Even Hubspot's homepage has 739 words. I wonder why homepages seem to be shorter if conversion improves with a higher word count.
I think it has to do with what's the most convincing way for a visitor to take our desired action. Known brands in well-established markets (Hubspot in CRMs) need less information to convey their value than new brands in "new" markets.
Depends on the marketing purpose of the blog post.
Is it to rank on Google (SEO)? You can analyse what word count tends to rank on page 1 to get a feel of the length it needs to be.
Is it a common question on sales calls? I'd recommend forgetting word count and just answer the question really really well, to the extent that your sales calls can be shorter.
Is it to improve your credibility/authority? These posts tend to require a longer post, (3,000+ words) as you're trying to cover a topic well and offer detailed and specific advice.
Do you want to introduce people to a complex concept? Start small and keep it easy read.
We're actually in the middle of launching a new online magazine and a large goal for the first 12 months is to rank on Google and is why our posts will be around 3,000 - 5,000 words in length broken down into sections to make it easily digestible.
Hope that helps.
You might not have numbers yet, and I know it is hard to measure completion rates. But do you have any idea how many people finish reading a long article?
I came across this old article from buffer, which mentioned 55% of the people read articles for 15 seconds or less. This makes me wonder if the whole SEO thing is like what used to happen, where people used to stuff keywords into the meta tags and the text to rank well.
I am curious what people observe, especially people who write long-form content.
We're not writing a long-form piece and expecting them to read the entire article. I'm expecting people to scroll and read the section they are most interested in.
I agree with @neils13 that you need to know the purpose of your blog posts to know the right length for your own content.
If you want to make a particular audience happy, you need to know what forms of content they find most useful/entertaining/whatever.
If you're trying to optimize for SEO, that has its own considerations.
If you're trying to optimize for being able to place lots of ads on the page, that's one argument in favor of long posts.
If your goal is purely to distill information, the content should be as long as it needs to be, but no longer :) Which could be as short as a sentence, or as long as a book, depending on what you're covering.
I'd also like to mention that the blog posts you saw may be so long and rambling for no good reason at all. They might just be bad writers! There's an infinite supply of bad writers in the world, and many of them are excessively wordy.
There seems to be some template at play in a lot of wordy articles. Most of the articles seem to write about the author's life history or why X is important to consider, where X is whatever the article is about, which got me wondering if I was missing something. But you are right. They may be churning out content without really concentrating on quality.
100%
It all depends on what you're wanting. If you're wanting SEO traffic, longer ones work well. If you want viral information to be spread, shorter easy to read blog posts will win out.
Thanks for that, I guess I will have to try a mix.
From my personal experience. With the latest algorithm that highlights answers to queries, I would argue that practically, extremely well structured long form content will drive most engagement. As long as you don't cover more than one topic, but instead link other topics from within, you will be fine.
Thanks. Just so that I am clear, by long form content you mean 2000-3000 words right or will something like 1000 words also be considered long form?
Many blogging "gurus" will tell you that longer articles outperform short ones. Others will tell you to base the word count on the best performing existing articles have for your topic.
I expect that a lot of articles that are artificially long to reach mythical "ideal word counts" are going to lose their rankings soon (if they haven't already). They're annoying to read, and therefore deliver a poor user experience. Search engines like Google are using user behaviour queues such as people bouncing back to the search results and clicking on another link as signals indicating article quality.
IMHO, articles/blog-posts should be as long as is needed to effectively communicate whatever ideas or solutions were promised in the title. No longer. No shorter. SEO tactics like artificial word counts may work in the short-term, but nothing beats an engaging well written article that gives the reader exactly what they were looking for.