We’ve been looking into optimising our content recently – both in terms of SEO and user experience – and that got us wondering what the ideal length of blogs actually was.

During our research, we found numerous brands, experts and marketers claiming to have the perfect ratio, but with all that information out there, it’s hard to separate fact from fiction.

In general, at Absurd Insights, we tend to aim for around 1,000 words, give or take – but are we hitting the mark?

Does that sort of word count improve SEO or diminish it?

Here’s what we found out.

What the SEO experts say about word count

It’s fair to say the marketing community is somewhat divided on the issue.

The SEO gurus at Semrush claim: “A blog post should be about 1,500 and 2,500 words long, ideally.”

HubSpot, an equally authoritative source on SEO, suggests a similar range: “The ideal blog post length should be 2,100 – 2,400 words.”

These figures were also reported in Search Engine Journal, though they point out that “this a lot longer than the 200 or 500-word blog posts most writers or webmasters think is ideal.”

In the same article, Search Engine Journal also alludes to the fact that Google themselves claim not to rank by word count.

“Google’s Martin Splitt confirms the number of words on a page is not taken into consideration when ranking search results.”

So, a page that has 2,000 words is not automatically better off (from an SEO perspective, at least) than a page with only 500.

In fact, when it comes to SEO, the experts at Absurd Insights argue that we must fall back on what Google has explicitly stated in their March 2024 Core Update.

Google is “refining some of [their] core ranking systems to help [them] better understand if webpages are unhelpful, have a poor user experience or feel like they were created for search engines instead of people.”

This is all part of their efforts to “reduce the amount of low-quality content on Search and send more traffic to helpful and high-quality sites.”

Now, exactly what Google means by “helpful” is up for debate but it certainly suggests that the utility of blogs and the user experience are far more relevant to SEO than any word count target.  

As always then, focus on providing genuinely useful content that is optimised for your reader and you should be ok.

But what do readers really want?

The readability factor – What do readers actually want?

Somewhat ironically, finding data on this was way harder than it was for the SEO section.

Regardless of what the search engines want to see from us, we should always optimise for content that engages the reader, gives them useful information, and makes them want to come back to our site.

And, with the average blog length being 1,427 words – with only three per cent of brands regularly publishing blogs longer than 2,000 words (Orbit Media, 2023) – it’s clear that most content creators aren’t following the SEO-based advice anyway.

What readers care about isn’t long blogs or short blogs – its useful blogs.

When was the last time you clicked on a blog and took a look at how long it was?

There are other forms of content out there too, that have very specific niches and purposes when it comes to marketing.

For example, a press release will need a different set of metrics from a guide or how-to piece, just as a blog will require different metrics from a web page.

The reality is, if it’s entertaining, informative or gives you some other benefit, you’ll keep reading.

That’s what we’ve got to bare in mind when we, as copywriters, create our content.

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