When you start exploring the blogging world, mainly technical writing, you'll encounter this question often.
Some questions that might pop up on your journey:
From your perspective, you might be wondering how long it should be to rank better.
If you write for other publications, they tell you it should be at least 1500 or 2000 words.
And you might be exploring other articles and see various lengths, which might confuse you about what is best.
But how long should your articles be?
The simple answer
Make your article as long as it needs to be to explain the solution.
To me, it's absolute nonsense that a blog should be x amount of words to rank.
Trust me on this one, I have 250+ number one ranking articles, and they are "short".
This is old-school thinking and often by those articles that still suggest meta keywords are a thing (and no, they are not).
I know what you are thinking, but you are a simple tech blogger, not an SEO expert. And that's right, but I'm also a stubborn simple tech blogger.
I do what I think works best, which has not been disappointing so far.
What does matter?
I've noticed the only thing that matters with content these days is: "Does the user like it".
I'm stating "like it" as it can be a range of situations.
- Your article is fun to read, so people read till the end
- Your article solves an issue, and the person is happy
- Your article clears some thoughts, and they agree
I don't particularly know how Google knows when these are true, but it seems they do.
It could be the person stops searching for specific terms, and google has understood your article has helped them with that.
Note: The above is just a brain dump, not proven
But, I can tell you that you should focus on making the user experience enjoyable.
To me, that means giving people an answer to a question. But for some, it might be to explain how something works in detail. Or perhaps even tell your story in your own words.
Conclusion
How long should blog articles be?
"As long as it takes, to make it enjoyable".
A very vague answer, but stick to writing what you think is the correct amount to explain what you are describing.
Don't try and fill your articles with words that don't add anything.
In my vision, there is no minimum but also no maximum words for blog articles.
There are only enjoyable articles and non-enjoyable articles.
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Top comments (7)
Actually make it as short as possible to get the point across or at least put that up front while being interesting enough to make someone who doesn't "get it" read on (executive summary).
There is some room to play with internal structure in terms of sequencing or even sidelining to keep the audience engaged.
The medium's greatest superpower (not available to traditional media) shouldn't be overlooked—hyperlinks; there really is no reason for an article to be a huge monolithic affair. Always look for opportunities to break it down into easily digestible, palatable bites.
Great points Peer.
For a lot of people their attention span is very small, hence things like TikTok and Youtube shorts are so popular these days.
I think the same is applying to written format.
Keep it short, but provide directions for more context, with indeed hyperlinks.
I agree with this, and I've written 50+ articles so far.
You don't have to write 2000 word articles, not even if you want to rank higher on Google.
I've experimented multiple times, and I can say (quite confidently) that keyword research does a good chunk of the job for SEO.
A very good answer to a very interesting question that we content creators often think about for far too long.
Exactly, people get so invested, but the answer is simpler then you would think.
If you want your articles to rank well in Google, you must also look at your competitors from the top 10 for your main queries.
Alright, I looked at them am I ranking higher now?
Sorry Bob, being a a-hole here, but I don't really agree.
What are you going to do with that information.
I never looked at any of my competitors and still get ranked nr1 for 80 keywords by now 😅
I agree to a point if that's your core business, yes you should really deep dive into the nitty gritty, but for most tech writers you really don't need to invest that much effort into things.
Not trying to be rude, but want to demystify the 100's of things people tell you, you should do that are really overkill for 99 percentile of tech writers.