Oftentimes, our clients will ask us “How long does the blog post need to be?” or “How much text is needed to rank well on Google.
If you ask 10 different SEOs this question, you’ll get 10 different answers.
For the most part, as long as the page has enough quality content to sufficiently answer the question or topic, it has a chance to rank online. (Keep in mind, there are technical & off-page SEO factors to help an article rank online as well).
When you post your article online, Google will take a look at the text, photos, videos, and other data on the page to determine if your page is worthy to show up on the SERP (search engine results page).
There isn’t going to be a secret sauce that works for every piece of content written, but there are certain frameworks that have been proven to help Google know that the piece of content is a good fit for the masses.
We will walk you through our thought process when we are planning to write a new blog article.
How Long Should My Blog Post Be?
If you are looking to write a blog post in hopes of ranking on Google, we suggest writing a minimum of 900 words.
…But if you write 900 words, will that flip a switch to automatically give you a chance to rank? Not necessarily.
We recommend a minimum of 900 words because it will be a big enough sample size of text for Google to determine what the post is about. If you write a blog post with only 250 words, Google might not be able to pick up on all the keywords (and relative keywords) that would be included in the longer post.
For example, you might be writing a blog post about “How often should you mow your lawn?”. With less text, you might only have the word lawn mentioned a handful of times and relative terms, like grass/rain/etc, mentioned a couple of times.
If you write the same blog post with a thousand words, Google will be able to pick up on the keyword mentions and will match your content to a searcher who is typing in the same topic online or a handful of similar topics. These similar topics are most likely going to be the “long-tail keywords”. Here’s an example:
You write the blog post about the frequency of mowing your lawn, but if you have a large number of keywords involving rain/wet/etc, Google may have you rank for the topic, “Can I mow my lawn after it rains?”.
Typically, I can look through a client’s list of blog articles and see a correlation between lengthy text and higher rankings. If there are blog articles that aren’t ranking well, the length is the first place I’ll focus on.
Should Every Piece Of Content (Service Pages, About Us, FAQ’s) Have More Words?
Not necessarily. The amount of text really depends on the type of content you are creating. If you refer back to my original answer for blog posts; As long as the page has enough quality content to sufficiently answer the question.
Some pages don’t necessarily need a ton of text. For example, e-commerce sites may have pages with different products to buy. Depending on how the page is set up, it could lead to a poor user experience if you tried squeezing 900 words onto the page.
When you are creating any piece of content, you should always tailor the page for the user. If the content has a ton of value, it will most likely be shared with others and you will probably end up with backlinks from other sites.
Can A Blog Have Too Many Words?
The short answer is yes. There are a few cases when you wouldn’t want your blog to be too lengthy. The main reason is you want to avoid writing just for the sake of writing.
1. Keyword Stuffing
If you are writing a blog just to cram in keywords, the odds of that blog article ranking well is going to be slim. Instead, craft meaningful ideas and messages that will resonate with the reader. Give your reader something valuable. Answer a question that has never been answered before or give some actionable advice that would be useful.
2. Boring the Reader
My father-in-law mentioned there was a mentor of his that said blog posts should be a maximum of 500 words, no exceptions! I asked, why would he give such bad advice? My father-in-law mentioned the longer the blog article, the less likely someone from their email newsletter would read the blog to the end.
I realized this was true and sound advice. This specific strategy was focused on engaging a reader that was non-organic (email list), so the writer didn’t care if the article was to be found organically online (search).
How Else Can I Get My Blog To Rank Higher?
You wrote your blog with a whopping 1,900 words and it still isn’t ranking. To make things worse, you found a blog article on page 1 of Google and theirs only has 1,600 words written. What’s going on with Google?
Again, Google will match content that Google deems to be a good fit. If your post contains content that is engaging and fills the gap of the reader’s knowledge or need for entertainment, it should rank just fine. Here are additional ways to help your article succeed:
- Use Long-Tail Keywords – long tail keywords can help you rank high for low volume phrases.
- Add Visual Assets – photos, infographics, embedded videos, gifs, etc. (don’t forget Alt tags!)
- Share The Blog Post – post this to multiple social media channels, an email newsletter, and to friends/family.
- Add Link To Home Page – feature the article on your home page to help drive traffic/authority.
- Add More Internal Links – on the more popular pages of your site, internally link to this new article to gain more traffic
- Use SEO Tools – using a tool like SEMrush & Yoast can help you determine how it is ranking so you can make minor tweaks to rank higher.
Of course, SEO can be complicated so there will be other technical and off-page strategies that come in to play. However, if you follow these steps above and write quality content of at least 900 words, you should do just fine.
Page1Design is Happy to Help
If you are needing help with blogging or SEO in general, we are happy to help. After building multiple sites, blogs, and helping hundreds of businesses online, we have found easy ways to make content found online. Page1Design focuses on white-hat SEO strategies to ensure your content on the site stays evergreen for the long term.
Feel free to send us a DM if you need any help with your project.
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