Great answer Lee! It is nice to see some hefty debate in comments these days!

It is all about the quality and it’s easy to get caught up in boxing in on a specific number.

I love the idea of using insights, customer preferences and goals to derive the answer to this very difficult question.

Despite the changing nature of search engines and consumer behavior, SEO continues to be a process driven practice creating enthusiasm for rules and specific questions like, how many words should a blog post be?

The reality is that marketers who skim the surface of their craft solely with operational best practices are satisfied with a certain number answer to that question. And then there are those who consider specific insights about customer preferences, competition, current situation and goals that understand it’s not about word count, but about the content quality and effectiveness.

500 words, 1500 words, whatever. Count them after you’ve made your content the best answer for the topic your customers care about.

Britney, thanks so much for your reply and comment. I also agree with your “unpopular opinion.” I’ve been trying to include top takeaways, main points, conclusions, tweetable bytes into my content for years. I also LOVE list posts which are not necessarily long but convey valuable info quickly. I think they support your view as well!

Feel Andy C. sums this up beautifully: “My best answer is: As long as it necessary to make the best page on the internet for the topic.”

Also love Rohan’s point: “Let me make myself clear: There is NO “optimum length” for blog posts. “Comprehensive content” is often misread as “word count.””

My ‘length debate’ hypothesis: With Google’s integration of BERT (continuously being fine-tuned), length will have less of an impact, the primary factor will be quality and fulfilling searcher intent.

+Unpopular opinion: The best succinct, short summaries (these can be appended to longer content) will win out over time as Google continues to wage their war on Question & Answering within the SERP.

A quote from Google’s Tensorflow team:
“Existing natural language models have been focused on extracting answers from a short paragraph rather than reading an entire page of content for proper context. As a result, the responses can be complicated or lengthy. A good answer will be both succinct and relevant.” –https://www.kaggle.com/c/tensorflow2-question-answering/overview

Wow, thanks so much Mike! This is great feedback and really useful tips (and the research to back it up).

This is a bit of a deja vu for me because, back in the days, people used to say 300 words was the sweet spot for blog posts.

Is the total word count a Google ranking factor? Certainly not, but I can’t deny that there is a strong correlation, based on my own experiences and my colleagues in the SEO industry.

Is a well-researched, in-depth content beneficial for the user experience? And can that lead to positive organic search performance? You betcha.

As a refresher, or if you haven’t already, check out Google’s own Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines (https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf), a good clue to Google’s guidelines on what constitutes as a good content.

Here’s an interesting bit in it that signals Google ‘may’ value longer-form content over shorter-form.

Section 6.3 (pg 34): Unsatisfying Amount of Main Content. Some Low quality pages are unsatisfying because they have a small amount of MC for the purpose of the page. For example, imagine an encyclopedia article on a very broad topic such as World War II that has just a few paragraphs.

My personal philosophy on blog posts is, to perform well on Google, always put yourself in the minds of your users. Why did they type this query into Google? If you can answer that, and create content to fulfill it, you will do well on Google.

Thanks John. Yes it’s been a while since we had a good debate in comments. I really appreciate your thoughts and also from everyone.

Wow, thanks Rohan! I can’t disagree and appreciate your perspective on this. My “what is marketing” post was just me doing my best to answer the question. I told a story, used a few sections to differentiate between confusing topics and provided my perspective. I didn’t start out by writing a long post. Just one that answered the question as completely as I could.

But still, I started out thinking 750 words would not be enough. Maybe length is a starting point guide post. But “completeness” is really the end goal.

Again, just looking to provide some simple guidance to a complex but very real and often-asked question. And you did just that Rohan. So thank you!

This is a sticky issue, but I’m going to say what I’m going to say without any offense to Danny, Michael, or anyone who’s commented here. Bear with me please.

“The research is clear: In general, blogs post should be more than 1,000 words. And the longer your post, the more likely it is to rank higher in Google searches.”

Can’t say much about the research (or the people doing it), but I certainly know from experience (of writing about 500 posts and editing a lot more) that “in general” (the emphasis lies here) blog posts should be more than 1,000 words. The longer your post, it is certainly “more likely” (the emphasis lies here) to rank higher in Google searches.

It is a simplification, Michael, but not such a huge one after all, Danny!

For the term “SEO” here’s what I see – https://postimg.cc/LhrS0z81

1 – Moz Beginner’s guide (Historically ranking giant piece of content. I’d assume Moz knows their SEO. My friend Britney Muller certainly does!)

2 – Search Engine Land (Same strategy as Moz, with a list of “chapters” that link to other content, so I’ll take it Google counts it as one.)

3 – Google Support (Giant piece again)

4 – WordStream (A looong one)

5 – Neil Patel (As wide as his smile. Michael, you need a special emoji in your comments to represent Neil Patel.)

Okay, SEOs have this penchant for long content (heck, I write 1,000-word comments myself: https://twitter.com/searchrook/status/631152035673473024) so let’s take a look at another query “what is marketing” where a definition would suffice for the “reasonable surfer” as Google calls her. However, Google shows:

1 – ama.org – While the title itself says “definition,” the post is much longer than a simple definition, including “green marketing” and “keyword marketing” which are *definitely* not needed.

2 – HubSpot – Stretched copy of the AMA post

3 – Michael himself! – Slightly shorter than a Peter Drucker book on marketing

Yes, while I agree that long posts wouldn’t be a good strategy for every company, it definitely would be for *most* companies.
Let me make myself clear: There is NO “optimum length” for blog posts. “Comprehensive content” is often misread as “word count.”

Read that again.

However, the most significant clue that Google has given as regards its notorious “core updates” lies in this post – https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/08/core-updates.html – under the very first section “content and quality questions.” It encourages you to ask yourself:

– Does the content provide a substantial, complete or comprehensive description of the topic?

– Does the content provide insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?

– If the content draws on other sources, does it avoid simply copying or rewriting those sources and instead provide substantial additional value and originality?

So yes, there is much more going on other than word count when it comes to Google rankings, but everything else being equal and given a choice, I would make that word count longer (with quality to boot, needless to say).

Not everybody needs to create massive posts… *IF they have site authority, brand loyalty, or a more profitable source of customers other than Google search. The rest of us need to keep wearing out our keyboards.

Thanks so much Andy. You always have the “best answers” to these tough questions. And yes it makes sense! Very helpful.

I usually sit down and have 1,000 words or so in my head as a a general guide. Some of my articles end up at 750 so I go and find a video to support my points, or some data, or an example or 2. I think I average about 1,300 words on this site but it’s not because I start out to write 1,300 words. I just try to answer the question.