What’s the best length for a blog post?

Sadly, there’s no hard and fast answer to this question. Articles of different lengths perform differently depending on a wide range of factors: Where is the article being published? Who’s reading it? Is it well-written?

Generally, though, if you’re preparing an article for publication on a website, erring on the side of slightly longer is usually better (as long as it’s good quality). Longer articles – those over 1500 words – have a better chance of doing the things that we think content ought to do, like rank higher on search engines, and get more backlinks. This is because search engines (we’re talkin’ about Google here, friends) have an easier time identifying them as offering value.

And that’s because lengthier articles tend to keep people on the web page for longer, they tend to improve SEO (there’s more space for more keywords and links), and over time, search engines have identified that longer articles are usually those to which people gravitate and/or return. 

But while longer articles tend to perform better, it’s never a good idea to ramble for the sake of a few hundred extra words. Redundancy and irrelevancy are both enemies of high quality content, and there’s plenty of situations where brevity can pay dividends. For more in-depth info about the correlation between content length and performance, read this article from wix – it gets down to the nuts and bolts of all-things word count. 

At the end of the day, you should use as much space as you need to offer your reader a high-quality, value-led experience. No more, no less.