What’s better – brief and concise or deep and elaborate?
T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman or Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment?
Seth Godin or Neil Patel?
Is it all a matter of taste, or does personal preference play a supporting role?
In both literature and copywriting, quality over quantity is a general rule of thumb. But, what happens when quantity is a device for achieving quality, or a requirement for meeting external demands? How does this affect your choice of style, level of depth, or chances of publishing? How about likes & links?
When it comes to SEO-friendly content, which comes first – short or long blog posts?
But First, What is The (Real) Purpose of Content?
As a businessman in today’s business world, you depend on online channels to extend your reach and boost your growth. You use Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to build your following, acquire leads, and, hopefully, widen your customer base. You use your website to convert them, and your email to retain them. And, on every pit stop of this long and tiresome journey, you use content to delight them.
So, let’s say that its real purpose is to refuel your audience.
To propel them to keep going until the conversion point, and beyond.
A pit stop should be visible from a mile away and attractive enough to make you, well, stop. If it needs you to come back for more, it also must be friendly, attentive, informative, entertaining, and relaxing. And, if the pit stop’s owner wants you to put in a nice word for him, his pit stop must leave you in awe.
It’s exactly the same with content.
The first thing a good copy should do is catch the audience’s eye. This is what makes them open a new tab. Then, the content needs to meet their expectations if they are to click it through and actually read it. But, to lead them to the next phase of the journey, the content must exceed their expectations too.
Now, Let’s See How This Translates to Blog Posts
Technically speaking, there’s a couple of things you can do to increase your blog post’s visibility. You can come up with an attractive title that would help it stand out from the social media noise. And, you can make it SEO-friendly, thus ranking it higher for niche-relevant keywords on Google search results.
But, this only serves to catch the audience’s attention. Remember, your content is practically invaluable if nobody reads it through and likes it enough to forward it to their friends and come back for more. Gaining visibility is not a walk in the park, but sustaining and growing visibility is way harder.
Surprise, surprise, much of it depends on how long your blog posts actually are:
- On social media, long content gets shared more often than shorter blog posts.
- On Google SERPS, long content gets higher rankings than its short counterparts.
- In the audience’s mind, long content drives more engagement than short posts.
What about Seth Godin, you ask?
Well, I never would have mentioned him if he weren’t so interesting in the first place. Godin is an exception to the rule, which only means that, in some cases, short content can deliver the message. Sadly, you’re not Seth Godin. Try as you might, your chances for dethroning him will still be very thin.
Speaking if which,
What Does It Take to Succeed with Short Posts?
If you study Seth Godin’s 14-year old body of work, you’ll realize that he’s been doing this for a lot longer than you. For long enough, in fact, to accumulate an organic base of close to 400K Facebook followers. His name is a respectable one, with enough authority to outrank anyone on Google SERPS.
But Neil Patel fits the same profile, with two notable differences:
His shortest posts are at least twice longer, and his Facebook following is double the size and counting.
Be it as it may, Godin is still a worthy contender and an example for all marketers to follow. I’ve personally stolen many tricks from his book, and I must admit they work like a charm. There are, however, a couple of prerequisites that you must fulfill in order to succeed with his short-posts recipe.
- You Must Be a Master Content Writer
There’s no way around it. If you decide to go short, statistics certainly won’t be working in your favor. You’ll need to disrupt the industry, break the mold, and flip the zeitgeist, which calls for high-quality, 10x content that follows the principles of short story writing: concision, focus, and a punchline drive.
- You Must Be an Authority in Your Field
Like Seth Godin, you need to have enough loyal followers for your voice to be heard. It’s a fact that short content earns fewer shares than long blog posts, which means that it’s a very poor choice for those who don’t have an audience to share it in the first place. You can’t build a name with short blog posts.
- You Must Be Ready to Post Every Day
Or, at least every second day. In comparison to a 1,500-words-long post, which can be consumed in around 7 minutes, a 500-word-long post takes about 2 minutes of your time. It leaves your audience hungry for more, and more you shall provide. Be ready to write and publish your posts on a daily basis.
Without meeting these three requirements, short blog posts get lost in the online flood.
And there you were, thinking that longer meant harder.
Harder to write and harder to read.
Well, you were only partially right.
Search Engines Prefer Longer Content. But Why?
Let’s return to the aforementioned findings by Moz, SerpIQ, and Medium.
Empirically, scientifically, and statistically speaking, long blog posts receive more shares, higher Google rankings, and better response from real content consumers. It follows that they work better for SEO too, since their word count automatically triggers boss search engine crawlers, especially on Google.
There are many factors that influence Google’s ranking system, and SEO serves to satisfy as many of them as possible. Fortunately, most of them are inseparably intertwined – the length of every blog post, for instance, affects both the number of searchable keywords and the quality of the content itself.
The longer the post, the more fuel it can provide.
More space for you to make it friendly, attentive, informative, entertaining, and relaxing.
Understand that all search engines, Google particularly, rely on such posts to deliver exactly what their users are looking for. If you’re unsure of what that is, start with yourself. You are a Google user too (1.17 billion people are), and you’re aiming for information first, quality second, and amusement third.
Unless you’re a master content writer, you can’t achieve all three in under 500 words.
If you don’t believe me, try and see for yourself.
And, while you’re there, google something.
In 99% of cases, the top 10 results will be around 1,500 words long.
Also, read them to see what they actually offer, because…
Eureka! Long Blog Posts Are Not Better by Default
In a Matrix-like scenario, when a search engine crawler detects a 1,500-words-long blog post, it doesn’t assume that it’s automatically better than its 500-word-long counterpart. The crawler puts it higher for a split of a nanosecond, initiating another algorithm to determine if it fits the rest of criteria.
The 4 most important of which are:
- Content (and, since Google’s Panda update, thin content is being automatically dismissed)
- Backlinks (which also rely on high-quality content and your marketing prowess)
- Mobile-first user experience (a lesson for another time)
- Other technical factors (mainly encryption, headings, and anchor text)
Aside from UX and some technical factors such as encryption, the length of a blog post affects all of them. While writing great short posts is very hard, writing thin long posts is even more so. 1,500-words-long content requires plenty of information and research, and a number of headings are due to slip in.
And now for something completely different: keywords, backlinks, and anchor texts.
These elements make a trifecta that the entire SEO philosophy is founded on, with their chief rule being that they must be natural, i.e. organic. I dare you to organically squeeze in enough keywords in a 500-word-long blog post, to support them with natural anchor texts, and thus earn quality backlinks.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but that’s (nearly) impossible.
So, What Is the Optimal SEO-Friendly Blog Post Length?
A comprehensive (and previously linked to) research by Medium says – roughly 1,600 words.
(The 1,500 mark I’ve been using so far was only to round this number.)
(Another side note – you’re well into that many words right now.)
All ranking criteria aside, Google still needs to supply what its users demand. And, according to Medium and other data, an average user doesn’t like to spend more than 7 minutes reading the same post. It’s how far your audience’s attention spans, and how long it will take you to reach a certain level of quality. To catch their attention and lure them in, before awing them with both depth and creativity:
Depth works flawlessly once you establish some interest. We aim for at least 1,500 words, but when a piece gets any attention, we double down into a long-form guide, says Mario Peshev, CEO of Devrix.
How to do that with long content?
- By researching everything to the detail, and making your post-fact-dense.
- By staying to-the-point while answering your ideal reader persona’s questions.
- By being unique, conversational, funny, engaging, poignant, and passionate.
- By publishing new posts regularly, at least one or two on weekly basis.
- By making them effortless to read, and very easy to scan.
And, that’s it.
Surprising or not, long blog posts are provenly better for SEO.
That’s what both research and common sense say. But, this still doesn’t mean that just about any 1,600-word-long post will help you gain, maintain, and grow visibility on Google SERPS. Quality still trumps quantity, even when external demands require a highly specific amount of words to achieve it.
About the Author: Georgi Todorov is a digital marketer. He recently started his own blog about digital marketing DigitalNovas. His passion is to help beginners to start and grow a successful online business. He has just launched his White Link Building Service. Hit him up on Linkedin or Twitter @GeorgiTodorovBG anytime.