What is the ideal content size for a blog? Throw that question to a group of digital marketing experts and you’ll probably have a series of completely different responses from them.
As with almost every major issue in the universe, this one about the size of web content does not have a single conclusion that fits in every case. And for this very reason, you need to know when a 300-word text can be more interesting than a 3 thousand, and even when that a 10,000-word post may be the best requested for your blog.
Want to understand a little more about all this? So come with us!
Is there a minimum amount of words required by Google for your posts?
First of all, it is not a number of characters that helps in indexing a page in Google results is other factors. Therefore, there is no minimum amount of words that determine the success of content on the web.
There are posts of hundred and few words that were super shared out there and others of thousands of characters that have also turned into a huge success.
However, there is something similar between these very different cases: besides everything is perfectly optimized for Google, the size of the post fits right with the type of content expected.
The different sizes of different types of content
At the very end of October 2016, the entertainment world was caught off guard by the spectacular trailer for Logan, a Marvel movie that will tell a new story involving the mutant Wolverine. And what was lacking on the internet at that time was site and blog divulging such trailer of the film.
For one of the pages that reached the best rank in Google when we searched for “trailer of the movie logan” was that of some online news website. A page where the content did not even have 200 words.
Now, if instead of releasing a trailer, the online news portal would have been in the mood to explain “What is Inbound Marketing?” With less than 200 words, would they also have a good positioning in the search engines? Probably not, after all, for each type of content, there is a lot of text that suits the readers best.
Here are just a few examples:
Small (or fast) content
For those who work with clipping, fast news or short opinions on a topic, posts of up to 300 words can work very well, although it is a little more complicated to work on keywords and other optimization factors in short texts.
Basic content
500 words: For many digital marketing scholars this is the ideal amount of words that a post needs to have better chances to rank in Google results. And it makes sense to think like this since with this number of characters it is possible to create a good introduction to the text, develop the content, work on the keywords better and insert a good call to action at the end of the post.
However, what is not lacking are surveys which point out that nowadays people (incredible as it may seem) have become increasingly interested in extended content that goes beyond 1000 words.
Extended content
Some time ago, the MOZ people tested 3,800 of the best-indexed posts on Google on some topics to find out what the average words were in them. And then came the surprise: although most contained around 500 words, those with something around 1,800 words were the ones that presented the best optimization results within the search engine.
This is because our peak of attention during reading articles on the web happens around 7 minutes, which is the time taken to reach, on average, 1,600 words. Therefore, content with a total number of words close to that number tends to hold the reader’s focus longer and therefore their time to stay on the page.
However, it is good to emphasize that it is necessary to have in fact what to speak in extended contents so that they bring the expected effects.
Epic content (or mega in-depth content)
But what about posts with more than 2000 words? Is there room for this on the internet? The answer is, of course!
The fact is that mega epic content further deepens upon the reader’s attention making it even if it does not reach the end of the text on the first click, the visitor will eventually return to finish reading another time.
In addition, content with higher density is more likely to be linked to other websites and even used as a reference in blogs and third-party articles, which is great for ranking on Google.
The value of in-depth content
Still, on epic posts with 2,000 or more words, it’s good to keep in mind other factors that help this type of content deliver better results with Google and with readers.
Different words for the same term
When you produce in-depth material, you gain room to work on the various versions of your keyword better. And, as we all know, this is great for Google and its search algorithm!
Scannability
In small or medium texts of up to 500 words, it is also possible to work on the scalability of content – or, in other words, the ease with which the reader finds in the middle of that post only the information that interests him. However, it cannot be denied that in larger articles this point is essential for page usability and important for ranking on Google.
Videos, photos, and audios
The more content on your blog, the more space you earn to insert videos, photos, and audios responsible for further enriching that material, improve scalability – as well as bullet points and bold markings of the most important stretches – Help optimize that content on Google.
Now, keep in mind that all this will only work if your persona is interested in such deep content.
A content size for each type of person
Unless you’re a gamer, the chance for you to watch some gameplay video on Youtube for over 10 minutes is pretty small, right? However, for digital game addicts, 10 minutes is almost nothing! So much that the specialized channels of this type of content bet on materials of up to 2 hours of duration (or more).
This logic also applies to the content size of your blog.
If your persona is just behind some kind of quick information or is the type that consumes content only for generating traffic following one activity and another, probably a 2,000-word post will not make her head. Now, for those who have more reading time in the week or are looking for denser content to solve some kind of problem, up to 4,000 words may be small.
That’s why the golden rule for good content production is always to write the best content for your persona and not just Google (or you). And this includes also writing the best content updated for you.
Always update your content
Finally, there is a kind of account that can help you know whether or not a blog is of the right size for your blog: how long ago was it published and how was its performance during the month?
Did you find this story complicated? So we explain: if you created a post that for a while brought a good number of hits (or leads) and today is not performing so well, it is possible that an updated content with new information can help that material to come back and gain success in Google.
That’s why sometimes the ideal size for that 500-word digital marketing text written in 2011 today is 1000 words. After all, a lot has changed since then, isn’t it?
