The length of your blog posts can build your website or break it. If you thought that this is a myth then you are wrong. Pleasing the search engines is one of the targets of SEO efforts. However, you have to please your visitors as well. With good traffic then you will get good ranking on the Search Engine Results pages (SERPs). One of the best ways to increase your traffic is to make sure that once a visitor lands on your site then they will come again for more information. The length of your blog posts is a really tricky thing.
If there is a question that has never been answered definitively, then it must be this one; “What is the ideal blog length?” A longer blog post does not always mean that it will rank highly compared to the one that is two hundred words long. This article is going to help you out as you plan your SEO strategy. There are some important factors for ranking highly in the SERPs. Since you are using content to attract people to your website, you must have a fantastic content strategy. What factors are most important when you are setting up your content strategy?
Research study
The information in this article is from a research conducted recently. The researcher used blogging keywords that are used in popular categories like food, health, real estate, business, SEO and mobile reviews. In total, 24 keywords were selected. In a bid to make the analysis consistent between the various categories, only those keywords that experienced medium competition on both local and global scale were used. A similar number of searches over a specific period of time were used.
The data was determined using Google Adwords keyword tool. These were some of the findings that were made with regard to the most important factors in content creation for blogs and ranking on the search engines.
1. Blog length
The first five pages of Google search results were considered. It was noted that not all the pages were blog posts. Some of them were slideshows, web pages, recipe indexes, paginated pages and link resource pages. A majority of the search results on page one of Google contained content that was in the bracket of 1000 and 500 words. By considering all the five pages, the most common length was in the neighborhood of 750 words. It was also noted that the pages with more than 1000 words decreased and those with less than 200 words increased when the other SERPs were explored.
It is safe to conclude that the length of a blog post is very important. People who keep their blog posts less than 200 words are bound to get low ranking. This is probably because the visitors are not going to be satisfied with the amount of content. When the content is too wordy then the viewers are bound to get bored.
2. Content Freshness
The study also showed that the freshness of content does not necessarily drop as one goes deeper into the search pages. Fresh content is featured in the first five pages of the SERPs, but then terms and conditions apply. You must have either a good link-profile plus a well-established domain or have content that has high amounts of social shares. Content with viral nature is always going to make it to the first pages. The ranking of fresh content is short-lived though. This means that content freshness is not such a crucial ranking factor but it is worth paying attention to.
3. Number of links
As aforementioned you must have a very good link-profile. Link-building is probably the oldest SEO strategy for ranking on the SERPs. There has been a lot of talk about ignoring link-building in the past few years. However, Google revealed that link-building has always been part of its search algorithm for a long time. The company did not state whether they have gotten rid of it as a search factor, but results from this study suggest that it is still an integral part of search ranking.
Having manually or naturally built links on your page is going to work wonders for your link-profile. Here is a word of caution though; if you build the links inappropriately, you will be penalized heavily. Instead of desperately building links pointing to your blogs in the hopes of getting higher rankings, you should focus on content quality. When you have good information in your content and you spread word to the relevant audience, you will earn links quite easily.
It follows that your audience is going to share the information on the forums, on social media, brand pages and also Q&A sites plus niche blogs. The bottom line here is that you should let your content build your links for you and increase your SERP ranking rather than relying heavily on the links that are built to the content.
4. Keyword placement
Where are the keywords placed? There used to be a time when placing keywords in your URL and titles was vital. Nowadays it is not all that important. It is a good practice though. It makes it possible for the search engine to place you within a particular niche. It should not be an excuse for creating low quality content that is congested with keywords everywhere.
Conclusion
With all that talk, let’s answer the question at hand now- does blog length affect SERP ranking? Yes, it does. It is not advisable to create content that is below 500 words. From research findings, it is clear that it helps a lot to have high quality content. This content should also be of appropriate length. The keywords relevant to a category should also be used properly because they make the work of the search engine easier.
You can forget everything else in this article, but do keep in mind that the content you share on your blog must be very helpful. Finally, it is worth mentioning that for good ranking, you should create a variety of content types. This means that aside from articles, you can create videos and podcasts to share with your audience.
Author bio
Michael Bentos is an experienced digital marketer and part of the team at ParadoxSEO.com - the powerful platform that makes SEO simple. He uses various SEO tools to deliver continuously stellar quality work for all his clients. You can connect him via linked-in.
