How Long Should a Successful Blog Post Be in 2024
How long should ideally be a blog post to get at least a slight chance to rank high on Google? What should be the optimal text length of your article? How many words do you need to write to have successful, SEO optimized content on your website? Let's find out.
Even though you are looking for an answer to one of the most burning question of all bloggers, how long should a successful blog post be, we hope, you do not expect a simple, one-word answer.
Write a 1000 words long post, and you are safe. No, nothing like that.
In the past few years, blogging developed into a complex industry, where the length of a post is just a small piece of a big picture.
To make it work, you have to put all those smaller or bigger segments together, and the result we all want is to have great, relevant content, that brings us organic traffic.
We've been blogging for more than two years, have on our website more than 500 posts, and to be honest, in the beginning, we had absolutely no idea what we were doing.
What we found the most important on the way to be a successful blogger (whatever this term means) is the constant, never-ending self-educating process.
Once you have a motivation to create content that will find its readers we believe that everything can happen.
In the end, after several months of writing blog posts from our travels, we found out that enthusiasm is not everything, and we started to search for information that will help us to gain more traffic.
What we think is very important to say, not even the best content specialists have the exact answer on how long should ideally a blog post be.
Google, the same as other providers change their algorithm often, and it is impossible to say that when you write that many words and use that many keywords, you will be ranking in the fifth position.
No. But you can follow all relevant advice, and that gives you a reasonable chance to be successful with your post.
In this blog post, we would like to share our thoughts on how long a blog post should be.
If you are looking for relevant data and exact numbers based on long-researched statistics, this article is probably not for you.
It is necessary to say, that we like using our common sense mixed with the knowledge we gained along the way.
HOW LONG SHOULD BE YOUR BLOG POST
As we've already outlined, before you start counting the words, it is necessary to have a topic in mind you want to write about.
It is impossible, at least according to us, to write all posts at the same length only because it is good for Google.
Some of the topics are more complex, while some of them can be described briefly.
Sometimes it also depends on how you feel about the topic.
From my experience, it is much easier for me to write a lengthy post about visiting a city such as New York, than describing one particular museum.
But the reason might be that I write in English, which is not my native language, and it surely limits me.
On our blog, we have many posts that rank well, from 1500-word Qusayr Amra: Desert Castle with Unique Frescoes to 10 000-word Iceland 2-week itinerary.
Plus hundreds of posts in between. The length of the post depends on many factors.
COMPETITION AFFECTS THE OPTIMAL BLOG POST LENGTH
Every writer has a different approach to writing a post, but it is always good to know what kind of articles you compete against.
The rule of thumb sounds that more articles were written about a topic you want to write about, your article should be
a) longer, and
b) more detailed
What definitely helps is your personal experience. Without doubts, content is the king.
That's why we never write about places or things we've never done before, and we do not accept guest posts.
When you blog about a topic or place that is not that popular, such as, for example, South Coast Track in New Zealand, the competition is not that fierce.
So from the very beginning, it is clear, that the post does not have to be overly long and travelers interested in this destination will most likely find it.
On the other hand, when we write about our hometown, Prague, which is a super-popular destination in the Czech Republic, it is clear from the very beginning, without doing extensive research, that a 3-day Prague itinerary must be really well-written to rank high.
We do not say that when the competition is low, you can write anything that comes to your mind or that the post should not be quality.
Quality is, of course, another very important thing that comes hand in hand with the post's length.
It is also good to know that as the competition increases each year.
The reason is that blogging is nowadays popular because of the misconception that it is easy to make money this way - the average length of articles grows, and that's why professional bloggers must spend more time sitting behind the desk.
Only a few years ago the average post had about 850 words, but today rather count 1000 - 1200 words.
That still is not the sweet spot though, according to the stats, the ideal blog post length that ensures the best readability for your site visitors and at the same time enough content for Google to recognize you as a relevant site, is 2450 words.
QUALITY OF LONG-FORM ARTICLES
Quality is a very subjective theme. You want to write quality content for your readers, but you also want Google to understand that your post is relevant, so it must be clear that you are a person who knows a lot.
The very idea behind it is, that you must give Google some length to crawl your website, the longer, the better.
Now you just need to write the post down.
When it comes to quality, it also comes to your ability to write engaging content.
The beauty of it is that there is not only one way on how to do it.
As we mostly write travel content, we write the kind of posts we want to read when searching for information about our future destination.
Some people are better with words, or it feels more natural to them to write poetically about every feeling, every tree they saw along the way, and that's completely fine.
It is just necessary to find the right balance between quality aka relevant content, quantity, and the result you are satisfied with.
DAILY BLOG POSTS
Sometimes shorter posts are better than longer ones because they simply have all the information a reader needs.
The length of an article can also depend on the focus of your blog.
If you write daily blog posts commenting on the current situation, you’ll be completely fine with a 500-word article.
If you plan on writing a post that should be a cornerstone of your blog, it certainly needs more care and it should be ideally much longer.
Simply put, unless you enjoy writing for the sake of writing, it is always for the best to get to the point, and rather write 1500 words where you have something to say than 5000 words that say nothing.
SEO & KEYWORDS
When you look for statistics on how long your post should be, it is necessary to realize and distinguish that a large amount of content posted daily is not written by bloggers who make a living out of it.
If you would focus only on bloggers who have their blog as a legitimate business, you would find out that their posts are actually quite long, around 2500 words.
Sure, sometimes you might find a terrible article that ranks high, only because a blog has a high domain authority, but that's an exception.
When we talk about how many words you should write to get the best results, we cannot entirely avoid the topic of keywords.
Using the right keywords you want to rank for is very important.
We must confess, that even though we make living out of this blog, we do not overthink the process of using the perfect keywords for SEO.
We do not use any program, we just search Google, think about what we would look for when trying to find information on the internet, figure out what the keywords (both normal and long-tail) might be, and then we write a post that contains these words in multiple variations.
Rule number one is not to overuse these words and not to sound like a computer.
If you write a post on Working from home as a couple, even if you had used this sentence in your post thousands of times and you would artificially prolong the post, it certainly is not the way how to get the best result.
Make sure you do not overuse keywords, use them when it is relevant, and rather play with headlines, the goal of your content, make sure your posts are interlinked and do not forget to add affiliate links.
NO ONE WANTS TO READ LONG ARTICLES PARADIGMA
We could read many times that no one wants to read long articles anymore.
So why should you even attempt to write long, in-depth articles?
We told you we are not going to share with you the exact magical number as it is quite different for different type of businesses, but by now you hopefully came to a realization that longer, in case the post is relevant, is always better.
To be honest, we do not think people do not like reading long articles.
Sure, they probably do not always have time for an article that takes more than ten minutes to read.
But on the other hand, there are nowadays so many tools that help you to save the post for later, that we believe if the reader found the topic attractive, he or she will get back to it later.
Also, people like to scan text rather than read it word by word, so if scanning the text takes only a few seconds, there is for us no reason to come back as it most likely does not have much to say.
KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
Sadly, you do not write only for your community of readers, because the percentage of readers who regularly return to the blog is much lower than the number of readers who search for a specific topic (at least in our case).
You also write for bots and computers who by a complicated mechanism evaluate your post and decide, whether it is relevant, updated, and long enough, to provide readers with what they are looking for under a specific keyword.
Yes, you can read that a blog post should be at least 300 words long, but there's a large screaming BUT.
It might be perfect for readers to find such a short, comprehensive post, but the truth is, no one will likely find it organically, because algorithms prefer longer, at least 1000, but ideally 2500+ word long posts, depending on the topic.
When you write a long article that won't discourage your potential audience from reading, make sure you follow a few rules.
Make the design clean, and use headlines that will visually separate the text.
Also, try to use short and clear sentences.
That's my biggest problem I am dealing with because I am able to write terribly long sentences.
Fortunately, Martin hates that and make necessary corrections before we hit the publish button.
ADAPT THE LENGTH OF A POST TO YOUR BLOG
Last but not least, what might affect your intended post length is the type of your blog, the topic you write about, how often you post, what's your domain authority, and how many blog posts you already have on your website.
We've already mentioned that the most famous blogs sometimes do not need to write anything amazing, it is just enough that their website has the needed authority, and algorithms automatically assume that the post has good quality.
That is nothing wrong with that, they had to put in a lot of work to be in their current position, but it is something you should definitely consider.
What should you do to get to a position where you do not have to stress that much about how many words to write?
According to us, the key to success is posting regularly.
And by that, we do not mean regularly, once in a year.
After we started taking this blog of ours seriously and wrote one post daily, we could see a significant shift in our traffic.
In about three months span we doubled what we gained in a year and a half.
If you are about to start blogging, we think this is one of the things you must consider.
It takes time.
SUCCESSFUL BLOG POST
When we talk about how a successful post should be long, it goes hand in hand with the time you spend writing it.
The longer posts you aim to write, the longer it obviously takes to finish them.
Sure, once you had a bit of practice it helps, but still, you can expect that it takes about an hour to write anything between 300 and 500 words.
When I am on fire, I can do maybe 800-1000 per hour, but that's when I know a lot about the topic and when I feel super-comfortable.
So if the recommended length of a blog post is about 2500 words, it will take you five+ hours ONLY to write it. It is not an easy job, but we hope that after reading this post, we can all agree, that everyone benefits from long-form posts.
Well, here we are, some 2328 words later.
Hopefully, you find this article useful, and we are more than happy to read your thoughts, comments, or ideas!
RESOURCES
So what programs we use to keep Laidbacktrip running?
The absolutely necessary expense is purchasing the domain and paying for hosting.
We opted for Squarespace, an all-in-one solution as we like it is clean and straightforward.
But the most popular option among bloggers is Bluehost because you can install Wordpress.org on it.
In the beginning, we were reluctant to pay more for external services.
But we later found that some of them are necessary, and some of them make our work much more comfortable.
We use a professional email, Tailwind that helps us schedule pins for Pinterest and Instagram.
As we use only our own photos, Adobe Creative Cloud that is an excellent tool for editing photos in Lightroom and Photoshop is a must-have.
To improve our writing skills we use Grammarly Premium.
It all costs several hundred dollars per year, but it helps us with our business.
