The ideal length of blogs and articles depends on your goals and whether you’re writing for humans or Google.

If you’re writing for a human audience, that probably means your articles are aimed at clients, prospects, and professional connections. Your goals may include education, adding value, and demonstrating your expertise.

If you’re writing for Google, you’re trying to improve your rankings for the important search terms appropriate to your business. In other words, you want to improve your SEO (search engine optimisation) performance.

Both are perfectly sensible objectives, but each leads to a different answer when considering the length of blogs and articles.

Writing for humans

If your target audience has a pulse, there are three ways to answer the question.

Answer 1: As long as it needs to be

This isn’t meant to sound glib or patronising, but there’s an excellent argument that blogs and articles shouldn’t be a specific length. Instead, the author should make their points and then stop writing.

Consequently, a blog might be just a couple of hundred words long. Seth Godin is famous for writing short blogs, and the last time I looked, no one had questioned his writing style. Alternatively, you might need many more words to make your points; we once wrote a 6,500-word blog, and it was one of our most popular.

So, the first answer option is simple: say what you need to, stop writing, and check your word count – that’s how long the blog should be.

Answer 2: As long as you can hold your reader’s attention

Word count is a red herring in many ways, and the time we can hold someone’s attention is far more relevant.

On a screen, we typically read at around 200 words per minute. So, we can work backwards from an assumption about how long we can hold a reader’s attention. For example, if you believe your audience will spend five minutes reading an article, you have 1,000 words to play with.

Google Analytics helps us to get more scientific because it shows us the average time people spend reading your blogs and articles. When we look at Yardstick’s data, the most popular blogs have an average read time of around seven minutes. At 200 words per minute, we’re probably safe writing blogs and articles up to 1,400 words in length.

Answer 3: Look at third-party research

Research into this topic tends to be dominated by SEO-focused objectives. However, data from Orbit Media shows that the average blog post in 2024 is 1,400 words long. This has risen by 77% over the last 10 years, although it’s now levelling out.

Writing for Google

If you’re writing to attract Google’s attention, it’s traditionally thought that the more words you write, the better.

However, and unsurprisingly, it’s more complicated than that. For example, when I ask Google, “How much does financial advice cost?”, the top five links include articles with the following word counts:

• Position #1, from Unbiased: 1,737 words
• Position #3, from M&G: 492 words
• Position #5, from Wesleyan: 1,129 words

So, it’s clear that the number of words isn’t the only factor determining where a blog, article, or page ranks. And thank the Lord it isn’t. Otherwise, the focus would be entirely on the length of blogs and articles rather than quality.

However, there’s plenty of research to show that if you’re writing for Google, known as pillar content or pillar pages, more words need to be used:

• Semrush recommends that articles with 3,000+ words generate the most organic traffic.
• A study by Wix suggests that the ideal length for a blog or article is 1,500 – 2,500 words. They go even further by saying that 2,450 words is the “sweet spot”
• Finally, data from Wordstream shows that their best-performing content came in at 2,700 to 3,000 words.

Again, though, this is another red herring because most advice/planning firms don’t need to rank highly on Google. They can achieve their business objectives through referrals, recommendations, and other more effective marketing tactics.

So, how long should blogs be?

It depends.

I know, I know. You wanted a specific number, and I’d love to give you the certainty that blogs should be 500, 750, or 1,000 words long.

But I can’t.

If you’re writing for humans, we recommend you stop writing when you’ve said what you want to. If that means you’ve written 350 words, that’s fine. If you need more so be it. For longer blogs, you should double-check that the read time isn’t massively above the average your audience will give you. If it is, consider splitting it up into a multi-part blog.

If you’re writing for Google to improve your SEO, it’s different. You probably need at least 2,000 words and, ideally, closer to 3,000.

And finally…

All this talk about quantity shouldn’t mean we lose focus on quality.

Blogs and articles must be beautifully written and contain well-researched content relevant to the audience. They also need to be formatted appropriately for how they’ll be read.

If now’s the time for your business to start producing blogs and articles, but you don’t have the time or skills to write them, we’re here to help.

Yardstick Membership offers various options to suit all budgets. For more information, email hi@theyardstickagency.co.uk or call 0115 8965 300.