The word count of a blog post, or its length, is always a hot topic. Many new bloggers are very concerned about the word count of their posts and think that they must write a 3k word behemoth in order to rank well in Google. In this article I’m going to talk a little bit about my experience with blog post length, and show you a quick case study of 5 blog posts on one of my sites.
How short can a blog post be?
A blog post should be as long as it needs to be in order to thoroughly cover the topic. That can be anywhere from 300 words to 3000+ words.
So in light of that, some blog posts can be just 500 words long and rank #1 in Google. I know because I do it all the time. More often than not it takes more than that, but there are cases where you find a really low competition topic that can be handled with few words.
A look at my top 5 performing blog posts
This case study will serve as an example of if short blog posts can rank high in Google, and more importantly, make money.
The below screenshot is from my Mediavine Dashboard. It shows the top 5 performing blog posts and how many page views they’ve had, the page RPM, and the total revenue each page has produced from 4/1/20 through 10/20/20.
- 2039 words
- 784 words
- 1068 words
- 1305 words
- 1897 words
That’s an average of 1418 words, however the #2 earning article out of this sampling is under 800 words long and has made me almost $700 passively over the last 6 months.
These 5 articles have earned me a total of $2841.36 over the last 6-7 months. I wrote all of them myself. The ones that were around 1k words took me about an hour, the other ones just a little more than that.
So if we round up to 8 hours, which is a standard work day, that means I’ve made almost $3,000 for a days work. Not only that, I’m going to keep earning money from these 5 articles for years to come since they are evergreen topics.
Ok, but how long should a blog post be?
The answer to the question is largely the same as the above question. A blog post should be as long as it needs to be. Do not get into the bad habit of counting words. Just cover the topic as thoroughly as you possibly can.
I’m assuming you’ve done your keyword research, sometimes called search analysis, and you know how competitive the topic is. If you have, then you know who you’re up against and who’s article yours has to be better than.
It doesn’t hurt to check out the top 3 articles and see how long their posts are. There’s a little Chrome plugin I use called Word Counter Plus that can easily count the words on a page. I also think Surfer SEO does this but I haven’t used that tool yet.
Once you have an idea of how long your competition’s articles are, you’ll have a rough idea of what yours should be.
Having said all that, my average blog post is about 1600 words long. That’s purely by accident and the average of all of them. Sometimes my blog posts are only 500 words, I have a few that are over 4k words. It just depends on the topic.
Conclusion
To summarize, try not to worry about the length of your blog posts. Also make sure your posts aren’t ridiculously short. The chances of anything under 300 words covering any topic in depth is non-existent.
On the flip side of that, don’t write a bunch of 5k word articles. I’d rather have 100 1k word articles than 20 5k word articles. As long as your posts average between 500 words and 3000 words you’re probably fine.
This article is 630 words.