If you are focusing on your content strategy for a website, you may have often heard of the idea of the perfect blog length. Word limits for your posts are never easy to nail down. Whether you are hiring a professional writer or writing your content yourself, it’s tough to know if it’s better to write a 3000 word post or keep things concise of 500 words. Understanding the type of blog posts that will rank high and help your page improve can be important to your SEO strategy.
The truth is there is no perfect post length or perfect word count for any type of blog. No standard is put in place by the search engine or outlined as optimal for the algorithm either. There isn’t even a standard for the minimum amount of words that need to be in a post for it to achieve a ranking.
Although it might be comforting to have a set format for every one of your blogs, it is actually more of an opportunity to rank your page for keywords and quality content than focusing in on a format. When your content simply becomes stuffed full of keywords or other vehicles to carry keywords to the search engines, it no longer fulfills the needs of your page.
Having an optimal standard of content can help to make sure that the content that you are creating is of an excellent quality and also beneficial to ranking your page. Doing some research into creating better quality content or even hiring a professional writer can be a great way to make sure that every post can perform much better.
A focus on search intentions:
The length of your content really doesn’t matter when you’re focusing on the intentions of your users. Even though some of the packages that writers may sell you are based off of a word limit, the strength of your content really comes down to fulfilling the needs of the people that are searching for.
If you have keywords embedded in content, you need to make sure that you have a wealth of information about those keywords as well. Determine why a person might be searching for a keyword or what they might be trying to find about your page. Performing search engine results analysis could help you seek out some of the valuable target keywords in your content as well as determine what the user may be seeking as far as answers from your content. You might notice trends in data such as questions that people may be asking or comments on previous posts that users may have had. Focusing on answering some of these questions can really help you to build content that will have substance and improve your page.
Valuable content for your future:
When you are investing in content for your future, don’t think about the word length, consider the writing style that you choose and the topics that you would highlight. Writing styles which are extremely concise and to the point are preferred by many readers. Working on your formatting as well as working on the information that you distill into an article will always improve your content performance.
In order to assess which content is going to be valuable for your future, work at measuring content performance. Blog analytics and the back end of every website will give you access to a massive amount of data that you can sift through to see if your content is performing well. Work at establishing trends in this data and make necessary adjustments so that you can continue to produce valuable content.
Word count remains a myth:
When you are writing an article with the objective of word count in mind, your content will never be as valuable as if you are able to explore the searchers intent and then present the data into a valuable format. In some cases, your users will want a quick and comprehensive article. In other cases, users will be seeking out content that is much more longform and built to satisfy guidelines over a long term article.
Focusing in on the guidelines of an article and what you would like to discuss in that article will make sure you are able to fill it up with valuable content, the keywords you need and more. The word count doesn’t matter. If you end up with a blog post that’s 2000 words, 100 words or 300 words, it may not change the ranking of the page unless you are presenting something that’s considered valuable. When you start to answer your audience and gauge their interest over time, Google will start to identify you as a trusted source and this will always lead to more competitive rankings for your keywords
Focusing on your SEO to meet the needs of your business is a long term strategy. Worrying about how long blog post should be and buying into the word count myth will always leave you short in your rankings.
Interested in Quality, valuable content posted on your website that satisfies the searchers intent and therefore boosts the websites ranking overall? Contact us today for a free consultation on SEO for your business.
