Your Blog Post Word Count Influences Rankings

If you want to help your website move toward the top of the search results page, take all that search engine optimization (SEO) advice and lock it in the closet for now. If you want to make your site more engaging, ignore all those opinions about consumers dumbing down and not reading anymore. If you want to attract more website visitors, put aside any preconceived notions you may have about the Internet, its place in an intellectual society and who’ll read your words.

Internet readers are no longer impressed with a really low blog post word count. Anyone can throw a few words together, but when a blog post contains very little useful information, people are discovering it’s just not worth the time. Short blogs that are obviously designed to grab your so-called “limited attention span” are beginning to be recognized and tagged for just what they are — disguised ads and SEO placeholders.

The Number Continues to Climb

Just like the woman who says, “Size doesn’t matter, honey, it’s how you use it,” the saying, “Nobody wants to read a long blog” also is a lie. In fact, according to Orbit Media Studios, of the 1,000 leading blogs in 2015, the average length was 900 words, a 10 percent jump over 2014.

SEMrush found in a 2016 study that the average blog post word count for first-place entries on Google search results pages was 1,890 words. And serpIQ found that in 2015, the top 10 pages that consistently ranked high on Goggle searches contained a blog post word count of more than 2,000 words, with the top spot coming in at 2,416 words.

That’s a Big, Big, Big Blog Post Word Count

And if those words are strung together in an entertaining and easy-to-digest manner and if they impart useful information, they give readers a reason to keep reading. When a blog post has a high word count, it translates into a means for keeping visitors on your site for a longer period of time. That’s called “engagement” in the world of SEO lingo.

Blogs with high word counts are called “long-form content” in SEO parlance. Long-form content is identified by at least 1,200 words. Some experts say you need 1,000 and others say at least 1,500, but that’s like saying you need three people for a discussion, when some would argue that two or five make for a better discussion. In other words, the exact line in the sand is flexible.

Put two (or five) SEO professionals in a room, and you’ll undoubtedly get two (or five) hotly debated opinions on what makes for good SEO. The important point here is that the blog post word count should consistently reach long-form status, assuming you want to engage your audience and rank your website.

Who Has the Time?

You reply that you can barely scrape out a 250-word blog once a week. Or your in-house writer isn’t a novelist, but more of a rapid-fire Twitter genius who can put together a decent 500-word blog post when necessary. Or you can’t find enough to say to justify a blog post word count of 1,200 every month. It’s not an uncommon complaint.

But you can find help, and not from a blogger. Bloggers too are a thing of the past — or gradually leaving the scene in favor of true writers with a sense for trends, consumer preferences and marketing necessities. Today’s consumers want to understand and to learn; they’re tired of glib, short answers and incomplete access to the truth. They want full disclosure. To make a place for yourself in the content market now, you need to consistently produce long-form blog posts that have depth and substance. Your readers will find them inspiring, insightful and useful.

Where’s the Meat?

No matter what industry you operate within, you most likely can talk about it and its peripheral issues for days on end. Chances are that your spouse cringes when you get started at dinner parties because once you get started, you can’t stop talking about your business. But sit down at a computer to write about just one aspect of your industry that people might find interesting — and you choke up.

What’s that all about? It’s about being afraid — afraid to make a mistake that will be in print forever. A fear of not knowing the right words, not having a large enough vocabulary to increase the blog post word count confidently and stylishly. So today — right now, in fact — Ray Access is going to share the biggest writing secret of our industry:

“Write like you talk.”

That’s right. You know what you want to say. Speak to your audience as if they were sitting across from you at the dinner table. Anticipate their questions — you know you know what they want to ask — and answer them all. Don’t worry about fancy words. Just speak from your heart — talk about what you know. And then clean it up in the editing process.

Topics Galore

So, back to the issue about professional bloggers. Today, writers like those at Ray Access are not called “bloggers,” but instead are known as “content marketing professionals” or “content creators.” And content creators know how to take advantage of the many different techniques professional writers of every ilk depend on. Some of the skills a professional online content creator brings to the table include the ability to:

• Brainstorm a never-ending stream of trending, relevant topics
• Dig into the background and foreground of every topic to increase your blog post word count easily
• Shape the tone of a blog to suit your specific audience
• Sound just like you, as a matter of fact
• Tell a story
• Twist words to entertain
• Get to the point
• Elaborate on important points
• Drive traffic
• Improve engagement

Mix it up, but make sure your content marketing professionals are giving you at least one long-form blog post a month. That’s the blog post word count to count on. Otherwise, you may find your content marketing dollars are ending up like a splat on the ceiling.

Don’t guess what will stick. Ensure your readers stick by giving them content they can’t live without. That’s the kind of content Ray Access delivers.

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Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.