How Long Should a Blog Post Be? Blog Length Best Practices

How long should a blog post be? So much goes into optimizing your content for search engines, it’s no surprise thousands of words have been written about the elusive perfect blog post length. The truth is that no one length promises you a top-ranking spot on search engine results pages (SERPs). There’s also no official minimum word count requirement for search engines, either. The ideal blog post length depends on your target audience, your reason for publishing, and the article’s content. 

Learn about average blog post lengths, how to pick the right length for your own, and best practices for writing long-form content that keeps readers engaged.

How long should a blog post be?

The consensus among SEO professionals is that top-performing blog posts typically fall between 1,400 to 2,500 words. The majority of posts that reach the first page of Google’s search results are within this range. 

A study conducted by Backlink.io and Ahrefs analyzed 11.8 million first-page-ranking blog posts and found that the average word count was 1,447. In a separate study, the companies also found that long-form pieces attract 77% more backlinks than shorter blog posts, leading to better search authority and more traffic over time. 

Achieving a favorable ranking isn’t just about hitting a certain word count or including the right combination of keywords. The best way to keep users on the page is to publish well-written, informative content. Shorter posts, around 600 to 800 words, can also perform well if readers respond to the content and find it useful. The ideal length varies depending on the type of blog post, the intended audience, and the goals you set out to achieve when starting your blog.

Determining how long a blog post should be

To determine the ideal blog length for your article, ask yourself the following questions: 

• Who is the audience? Are you writing an introductory piece for beginners or a deep dive for subject matter experts? A beginner audience may require a longer post with more background explanation.

• What is the article’s intended takeaway? Educational pieces like explainers and how-to articles can benefit from in-depth descriptions. Announcements or entertainment-focused posts are often short and to the point. 

• What is your reason for publishing? You might publish a blog post to generate search traffic, surprise and delight social media audiences, or provide company updates. For example, SEO-focused posts are typically longer than other blog posts because they need to make room for multiple short-tail and long-tail keywords.

Best practices for writing long-form blog posts

• Choose a meaty subject
• Provide value
• Incorporate strategic keywords
• Include title tags
• Break up large chunks of text
• Use image alt text
• Include helpful links
• Approach the blog post as a reader

Long-form blog posts can help drive organic traffic to your website, deepen customer relationships, and establish your company as an authoritative source. These best practices can help you write long-form content that both readers and search engine algorithms will love:

Choose a meaty subject

Look for a complex subject that merits in-depth discussion; this will make it easier to reach an optimal blog post length without adding unnecessary filler. Broad topics that can be broken down into multiple subsections are a natural fit for long-form posts. 

For ecommerce companies, these topics often sit at the intersection of customer intent and brand expertise, such as product sourcing, pricing strategies, industry-specific best practices, or step-by-step guides that help merchants make complicated decisions. 

Content pillar topics like these should be broad enough to support several related subtopics. For example, “How to Start a Candle Business” could branch into wax types, pricing formulas, packaging, and marketing. It should also be focused enough that your audience immediately recognizes its relevance. Choosing a substantive subject gives you room to provide real value, rank competitively in search by using a wide range of keywords, and build out future cluster content that deepens your topical authority over time.

Provide value

High-quality content provides meaningful value for your audience. Aim for truly original insights, such as new research, reporting, or expert interviews. This approach guarantees that your post will provide information not found on any of your competitors’ websites. 

It also increases the chances of attracting backlinks. In other words, other posts on different sites will link to what you bring to the table. This draws more users to your site, since backlinks signal to search algorithms that your content is authoritative and worth surfacing.

Incorporate strategic keywords

Once you’ve selected a topic, use a keyword research tool like Google Ads’ Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or Semrush to identify commonly associated search terms. If you input a primary keyword or phrase into these tools, they’ll provide you with a list of secondary keywords to target in your long-form blog post as well. Include the primary keyword in your headline and subsection headings. This is the phrase users will be explicitly searching for (e.g., “How long should a blog post be?”). Incorporate secondary keywords into the body. 

Prioritize natural-sounding language, and avoid forcing keywords into your work in an awkward way. When selecting keywords, it’s important to consider search intent, or what the user is actually hoping to find when they enter a query. Aligning blog post subject matter and user intent helps lower bounce rates, or people leaving immediately after landing on your page. It ensures that readers find the information they’re looking for when they click on your article. 

To understand this concept, imagine a cooking blog publishing a recipe for molten chocolate lava cake. Molten lava may be a common keyword, but users searching for this term are most likely interested in volcanic eruptions, not cake recipes. Targeting the term “molten lava” wouldn’t help this recipe rank higher in search engine results. By contrast, targeting “chocolate lava” as a phrase may work because it doesn’t have the same dual connotation.

Include title tags

Title tags help search engines interpret an article’s content and structure. Using H1 and H2 tags to highlight your target keywords tells the algorithm what your blog post is about and can help improve your search rankings. Clear headings and subheadings also improve the reader experience. They make it easier to skim your article and identify key sections, which keeps visitors on your page longer. 

Headings also strengthen SEO by creating a clear topical hierarchy that search engines can easily crawl and understand. When you organize content around descriptive H2s and H3s, Google can better assess how deeply you cover a topic and which subthemes relate to your primary keyword—both of which are signals of high-quality, authoritative content.

Well-structured headings also increase time on page by helping readers quickly find the information they’re looking for. Improved engagement metrics (like lower bounce rates) further reinforce your page’s relevance in search engine results.

Break up large chunks of text 

Long sections can be intimidating. Writing in short paragraphs and using photos or visual aids to break up blocks of text creates a more dynamic experience. People won’t feel as overwhelmed if you keep most paragraphs to about four or five lines apiece. For each heading, aim for about three paragraphs at the most. 

Organizing content in this way can help lower bounce rates and keep readers engaged, leading to improved search engine rankings and more organic traffic over time.

Use image alt text 

Adding alt text to uploaded images improves the on-page experience for visually impaired users by assisting screen reader software. These short, descriptive phrases also help search algorithms understand photographs and improve your odds of ranking in Google Image results. 

Alt text is a way to include even more SEO keywords under the hood of your website. Though alt text won’t be visible to users, it will be visible to the search engine algorithms crawling sites for relevance to people’s queries.

Include helpful links 

Use hyperlinks to promote your own blog content and provide additional context. Internal links, links that drive traffic to other pages on your website, can help increase pages per session and make it easier for search engines to discover and index your content. 

Links to external websites provide additional context and confirm the validity of your writing, according to Google’s SEO Starter guide. Anchor links, also known as jump links, improve page navigation and provide additional structural information that can boost SEO performance. 

Approach the blog post as a reader

Your ultimate goal is to write a great blog post. Your page won’t succeed unless users want to engage with the content, even if you follow every SEO rule in the book. Read through your article and ask yourself if it provides a clear, complete, and meaningful explanation of the topic. Put yourself in the reader’s shoes and consider what valuable information they could take away from your post.