How long should a blog post be?

This is an interesting question because the recommended length for SEO is 300 words. If you wanted to target people searching for ‘how to choose the best hiking boots’ you would need least 300 words to be ranked by search engines.

And the emphasis from a lot of experts is for longer content. Evergreen posts that are 1000-2000 words provide a lot of value that people can keep coming back to, and Google will keep showing it in search results.

There is a school of thought which says that people will read for as long as they are interested, so if they are interested they will keep reading however long it is. (This is 150 words are you bored yet?)

Yet microblogging sites like Tumblr are extremely successful with short succinct posts, often accompanying visual or audio content.

Confused?

Well the long and short of it is just write as much as you have to say. Don’t make a post longer just for the sake of it and mix up short and longer blog posts for variety.

● Think about the purpose of your post, why someone would read it might help you decide how long it should be.

● Consider who is reading it and how much time have they got?

● Where is your audience coming from? A Google search for a tutorial might require a longer post than a link from Facebook to an entertaining story.

Worried that 300 words sounds like a lot? This is what 300 words looks like. Has it been long enough to learn something but short enough to maintain your interest?