Most bloggers have asked themselves the same question at some point in their career: how long should your blog post be? If you have done a simple Google search on the topic, you will realise that most experts contradict each other, indicating that their personal preferences influence their decision.
There is no benchmark, no standard, no set limit for how long your articles should be here, however, there is a proper use for both long and short blog posts. Whether you should use long or short posts rely on the kind of blogging you do. For instance, if you’re a lifestyle blogger, or blog news, no one wants to read through 2000 words. But if you’re writing a detailed how-to, then you may cross that 2000-word count. Matt Smith could not have listed the pros and cons better. Here is an excerpt from his article on bizzebee.com.
Short Blog Posts
Advantages
Short blog posts are obviously much quicker to write. This is a major benefit if you have a site that needs to publish lots of content, perhaps daily or even multiple times a day. In comparison, it is much harder to write out a really long blog post (i.e. 1000+ words) on a daily basis, as that can take its toll on the writer.
Short blog posts can encourage visitors to read the entire post. People don’t have long attention spans online, so short, quick to read posts are a great way to get the information that they want. This is particularly noticeable on news or magazine based websites as they publish a lot (not all) of bite sized content for their readers.
Disadvantages
Short blog posts don’t tend to include a lot of information. Whilst they may be good for news related items, anything else really requires more info for readers. You couldn’t hope to explain the inner workings of a subject in 300 words or less. If anything, trying to do that would just end up frustrating your readers and encouraging them to go elsewhere to find what they were looking for.
Short blog posts can be harder to rank in the search engines. Now I’m not saying that they can’t because plenty of short posts can rank well, but I do believe it is harder for them to do so. This is because of the way SEO (Search Engine Optimization) works. For search engines to determine what your content is about, they look at different aspects of it. These are referred to as on-page SEO techniques, so obviously the sorter your post is, the less of these you can include to help you rank.
Long Blog Posts
The advantages and disadvantages of long blog posts are basically just the reverse of short posts, so to make it easier I’ll just list these as bullet points.
Advantages
- Can contain much more information for people to read,
- Can include more on-page SEO techniques and keywords to help it rank well in the search engines.
Disadvantages
- Long blog posts take much longer to write,
- People won’t generally read the whole post, instead preferring to scan through it for the information that they are after.
Personally, I try to keep my articles between 400 and 600 words, with headings for each topic (and that is usually limited to three). I have noticed that people read only what they are interested in, and they skim through most articles. Every reader-base is different, every blog is different, and every writer has a different preference. Just test the waters and ask your friends and family for feedback.
Good luck!
